Dell spinoff SecureWorks opens IPO below targets at $13.89 a share

Dell cybersecurity spinoff SecureWorks kicked off its initial public offering Friday with shares priced below previous estimates.

The company's shares began trading on the NASDAQ late Friday morning at $13.89 a share, using the ticker symbol SCWX.

A day earlier, SecureWorks priced 8 million shares at $14 apiece, which would raise $112 million through the IPO. The company had originally targeted a sale of 9 million shares priced between $15.50 to $17.50 each.

Nonetheless, SecureWorks ended the four-month drought of technology IPOs in the U.S., the longest dry spell in the tech space in seven years.

SecureWorks was founded in 2002, then acquired by Dell in 2011 for $612 million. In October, following news of the still pending merger between Dell and EMC, Dell filed a confidential initial public offering for its IT and network security business.

In the past, many tech companies have chosen to file initial IPO paperwork confidentially under the Jumpstart Our Businesses ACT, better known as the JOBS act.

Under the statute passed in 2012, a company seeking to go public can file confidentially if it is valued at less than $1 billion. Other tech brands that have opted for this route include enterprise cloud provider Box, Hadoop purveyor Hortonworks and social media giant Twitter.

But unlike the IPOs mentioned above, SecureWorks has faced a very different investment market than the one that existed for the previous two years, when bullish investors willingly backed loss-making tech firms so long as they could paint a path to profitability.

Things are even more complicated for SecureWorks because of the Dell/EMC merger, as some consider the IPO a forced divestment by Dell in order to raise capital ahead of the EMC deal.