C3.ai, an enterprise AI software company founded in 2009 by Tom Siebel, went public in December 2020. On December 8, 2020 the company announced it had priced its initial public offering at 42 US dollars per share, offering 15,500,000 shares of Class A common stock for expected gross proceeds of about 651 million dollars. The shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on December 9, 2020.
The company chose the ticker symbol “AI,” a rare case of a firm claiming the two-letter abbreviation for the whole field as its name on the exchange. In its registration statement, filed November 13, 2020, C3.ai described itself as “a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation,” selling tools for developing, deploying and operating large-scale AI, predictive analytics and IoT applications, plus turn-key AI applications built on what it called a proprietary, model-driven AI architecture.
The IPO priced above its initial 31-to-34-dollar range, reflecting strong demand for AI-themed public equities at the time. Siebel had previously built and sold the customer-relationship-management firm Siebel Systems to Oracle.
C3.ai was an early pure-play public bet on selling AI software to large enterprises and governments rather than to consumers. Its listing, alongside the Hong Kong IPO of computer-vision firm SenseTime around the same period, marked the arrival of AI-first companies on public markets well before the generative-AI boom.