Nutanix filed to go public in December 2015 and then waited nine months for the market to want it. The wait paid off. Its software let companies stop buying separate storage arrays and servers. Instead they stacked identical boxes, and Nutanix software pooled them into one system that grew as they added more. In 2016, cloud computing from Amazon was drawing work away from corporate data centers, and Nutanix offered those data centers a way to compete.

Three Engineers From Google's Era

Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron, and Ajeet Singh founded Nutanix in 2009. Aron had worked on Google's file system, which spread data across thousands of cheap machines. The founders bet that ordinary companies wanted the same design. They called it hyperconverged infrastructure: computing, storage, and networking in one appliance managed by software. Nutanix first sold its own boxes. Over time it shifted to selling the software alone, running on hardware from Dell, Lenovo, and others.

The Year's Biggest Pop

Nutanix priced at $16 a share on September 29, 2016, above a range it had already raised. The next day the stock closed at $37 on Nasdaq, up 131 percent, the best debut of the year. Losses stayed large for years. In 2020 Bain Capital invested $750 million in the company, and Pandey handed the chief executive job to Rajiv Ramaswami. Nutanix still trades on Nasdaq under NTNX.

Cover: The Squirrel, Seymour Joseph Guy. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a squirrel (nuts, stored up).