In a big week for tech initial public offerings, Sumo Logic today began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol “SUMO” and hopes to raise $325.6 million from its IPO.

The cloud analytics company priced 14.8 million shares at $22 each. This is above the expected range of between $17 and $21 per share. Sumo Logic will also offer an additional 2.22 million shares of its common stock to its underwriters over the next 30 days, which would increase the total to $374.4 million.

The IPO follows two other high-profile public debuts this week. Yesterday, Snowflake’s shares more than doubled their IPO price of $120 to close at $253.93 for a market capitalization of $70.4 billion. Also yesterday, application development company JFrog saw its IPO price jump 47% to $64.79 per share on its first day of trading, putting the company’s value at $5.7 billion.

Sumo Logic’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provides monitoring, troubleshooting, and security information and event management (SIEM) tools. In its IPO filing, the company estimates its addressable market opportunity to be about $49.3 billion.

“We are playing in a very large market that turned out to be so much larger than I thought — and I thought it was going to be a large market when we started the company 10 years ago,” Sumo Logic CTO Christian Beedgen said. “Digital transformation, observability, and security are at the core of what every company needs, so we will be in a giant market. And we feel that we have a great product and a great delivery model as a SaaS company.”

The IPO will allow Sumo Logic to invest in its product and sales team and gives its platform more appeal “to another set of buyers that would probably not take a chance on startup,” he added. “Some folks are looking at this validation that comes with the fact that the company has jumped over that hurdle and it’s being publicly traded.”

While Sumo Logic started as a business analytics company, it has been pushing more into security analytics over the past several years. In 2018 it acquired incident response company FactorChain. A year later it bought Jask and that company’s autonomous security operations center (SOC) software.

Additionally, Beedgen spent nine years at SIEM provider ArcSight before co-founding Sumo Logic in 2010.

“Even in the beginning when we didn’t aim it at security use cases, people started adopting [the Sumo Logic platform] for security use cases because we solve the underlying data management problem,” Beedgen said. “There’s some amount of ripeness for disruption in delivering a SIEM through the cloud, as a SaaS solution. That aligns with our core philosophy, and we have made a couple of acquisitions to accelerate that. We have a cloud SIEM in the market now, and we are going to continue to invest in this for sure.”

But for Sumo Logic to cash in on this nearly $50 billion market, it needs to beat out Splunk, which also started as a data analytics company before pushing into security with its on-premises SIEM. While Splunk now offers a SaaS version of its security platform, Beedgen points to Sumo’s born-in-the-cloud status as a key differentiator between the two.

“We are a SaaS play, which Splunk, in particular, simply hasn’t been so far,” he said. “That’s our strength, and the IPO will give us two things. One is, we’re raising a ton of money. And we’re going to put that money to work to build a better product and bring it to more people.”

SaaS-based security has become more important to businesses this year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced employees out of the office, which means they need to access security and other IT tools via the cloud.

“With COVID, and work from home, and the new normal, it underlines one of our main tenets, which is software has to be delivered in through cloud,” Beedgen said. The flip side, of course, is that on-premises IT vendors and companies without a cloud strategy pre-pandemic have been hit harder by the economic downturn, and Beedgen acknowledges this. Sumo Logic will soon surpass a $2 billion valuation, which stands in stark contrast to the millions of people out of work and companies closing up shop for good. Beedgen said he’s “humbled” and “grateful” to be in this position. “Be excellent to each other,” he added, at the end of our interview. “That’s my final message.”