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One of tech’s most heavily invested-in startups finally made its IPO debut on Tuesday with a splat.
After 12 years marked by fitful starts and stops, View Inc.’s SPAC with CF Finance Acquisition Corp. II CFII debuted in public trading and dipped 3% to $8.92 a share.
Company executives have played down the IPO as more than a one-day event.
“For most companies, IPOs are exit events. For us, it is a financing event,” View Chief Executive Rao Mulpuri told MarketWatch on Monday. “We did not consider a public offering until now. Several SPACs started calling us over the last year.”
It’s been a long and winding grind for View, which has raised an astounding $1.5 billion. The company’s first iteration — it was founded as Soladigm in Santa Rosa, Calif. — was renamed View in 2012, a few years after Mulpuri joined the now 500-person company.
The technology is not easy, and took years of painstaking research and manufacturing techniques to achieve. View’s smart windows eliminate glare, automatically change their tint and let in more natural, and moderate internal temperature. They achieve this via a process that uses a pane of glass coated with electrochromic materials, which alters light transmission and blocks solar radiation from entering the building. The result is smart glass that increases energy efficiency, improves health and comfort, and promises better worker productivity. The smart windows adjust automatically, and can also be controlled through an app.
“Interest and importance of climate change” has heightened buzz in View’s SPAC, Mulpuri added.
A study by Cornell University found that employees in offices with Smart Windows had 63% fewer headaches, 51% reduced eye strain, and 56% less drowsiness than offices with traditional windows.
A separate study by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and SUNY Upstate Medical University concluded that optimized daylight and views in the office resulted in 42% higher cognitive function test scores and 37 more minutes of sleep.
Smart, or dynamic, glass is turning out to be a key component in the connected building market that some peg at up to $1 trillion. View estimates the smart glass market could eventually be worth an estimated $100 billion in North America alone.
View is designed into 75 million square feet of buildings including offices, hospitals, airports, educational facilities, hotels and multifamily residences. The company counts many leading businesses as customers, including Facebook Inc. FB, +4.09%, Uber Technologies Inc. UBER, +3.85%, Netflix Inc. NFLX, +2.66%, Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, +1.64% GOOG, +1.41%, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. REGN, +1.61%, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. HPE, +1.16%, and the major airports of Dallas and San Francisco.
