In U.S. This Year, I.P.O.s Leave the Gate at Full Speed

When the online food-ordering company Seamless was founded in late 1999, it was too young to take advantage of the era’s fever pitch for newly public start-ups.

In the intervening 14 years, the market has waxed and waned, but the business of initial public offerings is bustling once more, just as the company, which merged last year with its rival GrubHub, is finally preparing its own stock listing.

GrubHub, as the merged companies are now called, and IMS Health, a big provider of prescription data, are two of the latest companies hoping to seize upon investor demand for new stock offerings. But they are also hoping to avoid the stumbles that have bedeviled a few high-profile issuers in recent weeks, most prominently King Digital Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush Saga.

They may be off to a promising start. GrubHub priced its offering on Thursday night at $26 a share, surpassing an already increased price range and raising $192.4 million for itself and investors who plan to sell.The IMS offering was priced at $20 a share, raising $1.3 billion.

One thing is clear: The market for I.P.O.s has reached levels unseen in years. Companies worldwide raised $47.2 billion in new stock sales during the first quarter, up 98 percent compared with those in the same period a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters.

The United States has proved even busier, with 64 companies raising $10.6 billion in the most active first quarter since 2000, according to data from Renaissance Capital.

So far, the pace of new offerings shows little sign of slowing down. Several big names â€" including the Alibaba Group, the Chinese online commerce giant whose coming I.P.O. could set records for size â€" are expected to debut this year. Other eagerly anticipated offerings include those for the online storage provider Box and the sports camera maker GoPro.

“The pipeline is really strong,” said Neil Dhar, the United States leader of PricewaterhouseCoopers’s capital markets practice.

As the stock markets continue to boom, aided by low interest rates, investors have continued to clamor for I.P.O.s as mutual funds and other financial players chase growth.

“When most offerings go out, they’re way oversubscribed,” Mr. Dhar said. “Investor sentiment around I.P.O.s is still very strong.”

GrubHub certainly seized upon investor anticipation. The company disclosed on Monday that it had raised its expected price range by $3 a share, to $23 to $25 each. At its offering price, the company will be valued at about $2 billion.

Drawing investor attention was the company’s remarkable growth. GrubHub reported a nearly 67 percent jump in sales last year, to $137.1 million. The number of revenue-generating food orders that it processes each day, what the company calls “daily average grubs,” rose 44 percent, to 135,500, though some of the increase can be attributed to the merger with Seamless.

IMS Health, on the other hand, has lured investors with its strong financial performance. The company reported $2.5 billion in revenue last year, its fourth consecutive year of rising sales. Its financial operations have been so healthy that its private equity owners took out $753 million in dividends last year.

Not all companies looking to go public are feeling so bold about their prospects. Virtu Financial, a high-frequency trading firm, disclosed in its prospectus that it lost money on just one day in nearly five years, an achievement that not even Goldman Sachs can claim. But it has postponed its coming I.P.O. until at least later this month as it waits for the furor stirred up by Michael Lewis’s latest book, “Flash Boys,” to quiet down, according to people briefed on the matter.

Nevertheless, investment firms continue to see I.P.O.s as a potentially lucrative way to cash out their investments. Private equity firms in particular are choosing to take their portfolio companies public, betting that they will ultimately reap more by selling shares over time than by selling the companies outright.

Most of GrubHub’s backers, notably Spectrum Equity, Warburg Pincus and an arm of Goldman Sachs, are selling stock in the offering.

IMS’s main backers, including TPG and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, are expected to sell more than 13 million shares.

Despite the torrid pace of the I.P.O. business, some signs of investor wariness are beginning to appear. Renaissance Capital’s I.P.O. exchange-traded fund, which tracks the stock performance of recent offerings, has lagged behind the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for most of the last month, in part because of poor performers.

King Digital, the company behind the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga puzzle game, has traded consistently below its offering price of $22.50 a share in one of the most disappointing market debuts in recent months. The stock closed on Thursday at $19.93.

And the stock of Castlight Health, whose software helps corporations manage their health care costs, has tumbled 43 percent since it started trading two weeks ago. Its closing stock price on Thursday, $22.54, remains well above its offering price of $16, however.

Analysts have pointed to a recent slowdown in highflying growth stocks, like Yelp, the online review site. Its shares have dropped 26 percent over the last month, closing on Thursday at $70.61.

Those stumbles may force some companies and their advisers to price I.P.O.s more conservatively for the time being.

To Kathleen S. Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital, that market discipline is welcome.

“Investors have become more cautious because the returns have been poor,” she said. “This is not 1999 or 2000, in that investors are not jumping to get into everything.”