Opera Raises $115 Million in Initial Public Offering

Opera in an underdog in a browser market, if compared to Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.

Compared to those giants, Opera only has a tiny market share. But still, that is a huge market that it’s enough to generate revenue. The company revealed that it generated $128.9 million in operating revenue in 2017, which resulted in $6.1 million in net profit.

In an IPO, Opera raised over $115 million, selling 9.6 million shares at $12 each.

Opera Ltd. first filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. earlier this month. As it started its trading, the company trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol OPRA.

Alongside its IPO. Opera also secured a $60 million private funding round from Tospring Technology (Bitmain), which makes Bitcoin mining computers, IDG Capital Fund and IDG Capital Investors. And the financial firms underwriting the IPO had an option to release another 15 percent of shares.

Opera has a long history before reaching this height.

Opera was founded in Norway, and considered as one of longest-lived browsers on the market. It began as a 1994 research project at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, which spun it off in 1995. Opera has never achieved the status of its bigger rivals over the years of its existence: from Netscape Navigator at the beginning, to Microsoft's Internet Explorer a few years later, and later Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari.

But still, the company was able to remain relevant yet steady in the market, with products that include: a desktop browser, different mobile browsers and a standalone Opera News app.

When the company behind the browser, Opera Software, was acquired by a Chinese consortium in 2016, the rebranded to Otello Corporation.

Overall, around 182 million people use at least one Opera product every month.

But since the browser market is dominated by only a few, Opera had a hard time in keeping up.

Most of the company's revenue comes from its deals with Google and Yandex. Those two search engines pay a hefty fee to be the default search engine in Opera products. Yandex is the default option in Russia, while Google is the default for the rest of the world.

The company also makes money from ads and licensing deals.

So here, Opera’s business model is directly affected and correlated by its user base.