Renaissance Technologies LLC Purchases 361,905 Shares of Backblaze, Inc. $BLZE

Renaissance Technologies LLC raised its position in shares of Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) by 44.6% in the 1st quarter, HoldingsChannel.com reports. The institutional investor owned 1,172,657 shares of the company’s stock after purchasing an additional 361,905 shares during the period. Renaissance Technologies LLC’s holdings in Backblaze were worth $4,046,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently modified their holdings of BLZE. Baader Bank Aktiengesellschaft bought a new stake in Backblaze during the fourth quarter worth about $699,000. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership increased its stake in shares of Backblaze by 56.0% during the first quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 300,504 shares of the company’s stock valued at $1,037,000 after purchasing an additional 107,876 shares in the last quarter. GSA Capital Partners LLP lifted its holdings in shares of Backblaze by 159.7% during the fourth quarter. GSA Capital Partners LLP now owns 299,218 shares of the company’s stock valued at $1,394,000 after purchasing an additional 184,015 shares during the last quarter. Nano Cap New Millennium Growth Fund L P purchased a new position in shares of Backblaze during the fourth quarter valued at approximately $1,165,000. Finally, Universal Beteiligungs und Servicegesellschaft mbH bought a new stake in shares of Backblaze in the 4th quarter worth approximately $712,000. 54.03% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

BLZE has been the topic of several recent research reports. Citigroup restated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Backblaze in a research note on Thursday, July 23rd. Lake Street Capital reissued a “buy” rating and issued a $21.00 target price on shares of Backblaze in a report on Tuesday. William Blair raised Backblaze from an “underperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research note on Tuesday, June 23rd. Oppenheimer raised their price target on Backblaze from $15.00 to $25.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a report on Tuesday. Finally, Citizens Jmp lifted their price target on Backblaze from $16.00 to $21.00 and gave the stock a “market outperform” rating in a research report on Tuesday. Eight equities research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, one has assigned a Hold rating and one has given a Sell rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $19.71.

Backblaze Stock Performance

Shares of NASDAQ BLZE opened at $18.82 on Friday. The firm’s 50-day moving average price is $12.68 and its 200-day moving average price is $7.50. Backblaze, Inc. has a 52-week low of $3.26 and a 52-week high of $23.99. The company has a market cap of $1.16 billion, a PE ratio of -55.35 and a beta of 1.56. The company has a quick ratio of 1.05, a current ratio of 1.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.34.

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) last released its quarterly earnings data on Monday, August 3rd. The company reported $0.08 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.02 by $0.06. The firm had revenue of $42.71 million during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $39.94 million. Backblaze had a negative net margin of 13.07% and a negative return on equity of 16.73%. As a group, analysts anticipate that Backblaze, Inc. will post -0.37 EPS for the current year.

Backblaze Profile

Backblaze, Inc, a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things.