Wall Street doesn’t seem to be nearly as enthusiastic about the applications of solid-state memory in the enterprise as storage practitioners judging by the reception to Pure Storage’s IPO. The array vendor, which saw its revenue quadruple last year, is now trading below the target price range of yesterday’s offering after failing to end flash’s bad streak on the stock exchange.

The saga started in 2011 when Fusion-io Inc., the then-posterchild of the transition beyond traditional disk, rang the opening bell of the NYSE to the sound of applause from traders who quickly catapulted its shares past the initial offering price of $19 to $22.50 by the end of the day. The stock went on to nearly double over the next few months, but that momentum was not to last.

Fusion-io’s reliance on a handful of large customers for the bulk of its revenue made it impossible to meet public investors’ steep growth exceptions, which led to an inevitable fall from grace that eventually forced management to sell out in 2014 for $300 million less than its post-IPO valuation.  Adding insult to Wall Street’s injury, another flash vendor called Violin Memory Inc. is currently caught in a similar death spiral following an equally high-profile public offering two years ago.

All of that appeared to have soured the atmosphere for Pure, which is in a similar situation to its predecessors with losses exceeding revenue as of its last fiscal year. As a result, the company’s stock ended its first day of trading a mere cent above the bottom of the offering’s original $16-$18 target price range, netting $425 million, and is hovering around $15.7 at the time of writing.

Admittedly, it probably didn’t help that it’s been a rather bad period for IPOs in general, with Reuters reporting that several of the firms that went public earlier this year are trading below their launch prices and a number of others are delaying their offerings to avoid the same fate. But investors’ concerns over its finances can’t be so easily dismissed given flash vendors’ shaky track record on the stock exchange. 

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