Frank Quattrone, the former investment banking star sidelined in a four-year fight over obstruction of justice charges, returns to the tech IPO bandwagon with his firm Qatalyst Partners serving as financial advisor to filer QuinStreet.
QuinStreet of Foster City, California, on Tuesday priced 10 million shares at a $17 to $19 range, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission document, citing Mr. Quattrone's Qatalyst as the company's financial advisor.
Mr. Quattrone -- who took public Netscape, Amazon.com, and Cisco, among others -- was the IPO deal maker at Credit Suisse during the go-go era Internet boom of the 1990s.
The former Internet investment star, Mr. Quattrone returns to the stage at time when the venture industry has lacked the boutique bank expertise of year's past to help entrepreneurs navigate the public markets. The smaller banks mostly went away after the dot-com crash as the industry steered toward larger deals with higher management fees and markets that were supportive of M&A activity.
QuinStreet is expected to go public the week of February 8, according to IPO watcher Renaissance Capital.
Foster City, California, QuinStreet promises clients improved results from search engines, serving qualified leads or targeted clicks to customers. The company's financials make it a strong contender to go public. For fiscal 2009, it reported a $17.3 million profit and reported profits ranging $12.9 million to $15.6 million a year dating back to 2005.
Founded in 1999, QuinStreet has raised about $60 million in venture capital from the likes of Granite Global Ventures, Split Rock Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Catteron Partners, Partech International, Focus Ventures, Rosewood Capital, Charter Growth Capital, VSP Capital, J&W Seligman, and Stanford University.