Pivotal Software stock started trading on the New York Stock Exchange this morning after setting its initial public offering (IPO) share price at $15. The company late Thursday said it raised $555 million by selling 37 million shares ahead of its NYSE debut.

Pivotal’s stock was trading up about 5 percent around midday on Friday when SDxCentral caught up with the company’s CFO Cynthia Gaylor. Earlier in the day, the cloud-software company’s stock spiked 10 percent in the moments after trading opened.

“We had a really strong open, but we’re really thinking long-term,” Gaylor said. “We’re focused on executing the business against the huge market opportunity we have.”

The company is best known for its Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) software, which allows companies to deploy applications to multiple public and private cloud platforms with no changes to the application. It claims 50 of the Fortune 500 companies use PCF, and customers include Southwest Airlines, Boeing, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Allstate, and Ford. GE and Ford are also investors.

In its IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Pivotal said its total revenue reached $509.4 million in fiscal 2018, representing growth of 22 percent year-over-year. But it’s also losing a lot of money and took a $163.5 million net loss in fiscal 2018.

Gaylor won’t say when Pivotal expects to be profitable: “We’re not giving out an exact time frame.” But she added, the company's revenue growth is impressive for a software company.

“We’re a high-growth software company at scale, and that’s pretty unique,” Gaylor said. “We did just over $500 million in total revenue last year, and over half of that, $259 million, came from subscriptions — that grew 73 percent. That’s growing at a pretty quick rate, and there aren’t that many software subscription companies that have revenue anywhere close to that. We’re in pretty rarified air in terms of being a growth company at scale.”

Pivotal started as an EMC-VMware spinoff in 2013. Dell became the majority owner of Pivotal when it merged with EMC in 2016.

Dell Technologies still owns about 70 percent of Pivotal stock even after the IPO and will retain about 96 percent of voting shares. Dell’s Class B shares get 10 votes per share, compared to Class A shares sold in the IPO that have one vote per share.

Photo: Pivotal CEO Rob Mee (left), NYSE President Thomas W. Farley, and Pivotal CFO Cynthia Gaylor.