Appian Corp.’s soaring stock price has made its founder and CEO Matt Calkins richer than local billionaire and Washington Nationals owner Ted Lerner and his family, according to a review of the value of his stock holdings in the company.
The low-code and no-code software company based in Tysons has seen its share price skyrocket in recent months from about $50 over the summer to about $211 now. It had peaked at $235 per share on Jan. 27. Calkins owns about 29,285,003 shares of Appian stock, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2020, the latest available.
That makes the stock worth about $6.18 billion. Ted Lerner, who owns Lerner Enterprises and the Nationals, and his family have a net worth of about $4.8 billion, according to Forbes' real-time tracker of billionaires.
Appian (NASDAQ: APPN) declined to comment for this story. But it is not the only tech-oriented company to see a surge in share prices in recent months, although it’s unclear what is driving the specific surge in Appian’s share price. But the company has seen its bottom line improve during the pandemic.
Revenue in the third quarter was $77.3 million, up 17% compared to the same time last year. Cloud subscription revenue specifically was $34.3 million, up 40% from the third quarter of 2019. The company saw its losses narrow, down to just $3.6 million, from a loss of $14.7 million during the third quarter of 2019. Revenue for the first nine months of 2020 was $222.9 million, up from $191.7 million during the first nine months of 2019. Losses were $27 million for the first nine months of 2020, down from nearly $40 million during the first nine months of 2019. The company plans to release its full-year and fourth-quarter earnings results on Feb. 18.
Calkins’ stock value had first made the tech founder and noted board game enthusiast a billionaire when it grew to more than $35 per share in early 2018, putting him a hair over $1 billion. But the recent stock growth has pushed his paper wealth to new heights.
Calkins has repeatedly told the Washington Business Journal he does not pay attention to his company's share price, stating in 2018, “I don’t take it seriously and I don’t think anybody should. Stock prices move up and down.“
The company, founded in 1999 and originally based in Reston until its move to Tysons, had one of the most successful IPOs in 2017, and has grown steadily in recent years. In early 2020 it acquired Spanish firm Novayre Solutions SL, part of its bid to get a piece of the robotic process automation market that research firm Forrester predicts will be worth $12 billion by 2023. That was its first acquisition.
In March, the company rolled out a low-code application to help organizations with a "central command center" to handle the then-growing Covid-19 pandemic and the health challenges it brought.
