Talend's free software had been downloaded more than two million times before the company sold a single share to the public. That was the plan. Developers found the open-source tools, used them to move data between systems, and brought them into their companies. Then Talend sold those companies a paid version with more power and support. The French startup, with offices near Paris and in Redwood City, California, listed on Nasdaq in July 2016.

Open Source as a Sales Team

Bertrand Diard and Fabrice Bonan founded Talend in France in 2005. It launched its first product in 2006 and began selling subscriptions in 2007. The work it did was unglamorous and vital: pulling data out of one system, cleaning it and loading it into another. Talend's free version did the job for small projects and found its own users. The paid platform, Talend Data Fabric, was priced mostly by the number of users.

A 54 Percent Opening

Talend priced 5.25 million American Depositary Shares at $18 on July 28, 2016, and raised about $94.5 million. The stock opened on Nasdaq the next day at $27.66 under the ticker TLND, 54 percent above the offer, and closed at $25.50. Talend moved its products to the cloud in the years that followed. Thoma Bravo agreed to buy it in March 2021 for $66 a share, about $2.4 billion. Thoma Bravo then combined it with Qlik, another company it owned, in 2023.

Cover: The Old Footbridge, Banks of the Petit Morin, Louis Auguste Lepère. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an old footbridge joining two banks (data integration).