This new Twin Cities company set a Minnesota IPO record at $1.5B

The Twin Cities has a new public company, Forgent Power Solutions, which raised $1.5 billion from its initial public stock offering, setting a Minnesota record.

Forgent is capitalizing on America’s data center boom that’s undergirding the growth of artificial intelligence. The company makes electrical distribution equipment for power and industrial infrastructure.

If U.S. manufacturing reshoring efforts succeed and more factories are built, there could be greater demand for the company’s products.

The IPO on Feb. 5 — the first this year in Minnesota —beat the former record set by the company then known as Bright Health Group in June 2021, when its IPO raised $924 million.

Forgent dates back only seven months, when San Diego-based private equity firm Neos Partners merged together companies it bought in 2023 and 2024.

During the IPO, the company sold 56 million shares at $27 a share, which is the midpoint of its previously disclosed offering range. Shares increased 16% on the first day of trading and are currently trading more than $35.50 a share.

In September, Forgent opened a 500,000-square-foot plant in Dayton, increasing its manufacturing footprint in Minnesota to 630,000 square feet. The company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last year that it planned to spend $205 million to increase capacity at five plants, including the Dayton campus.

The companies that make up Forgent had $753 million in revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, the SEC filing said. The revenue was up 56% from the prior year.

“We believe we are one of only a small number of companies that can engineer and manufacture all of the electrical distribution equipment required for a data center or large manufacturing facility’s powertrain,” Forgent wrote in its filing.

Neos in 2022 identified electrical distribution equipment as a bottleneck in the developing data center market and decided that a vertically integrated company with design, engineering and manufacturing expertise and capacity could serve the need, according to the SEC filing.

So it set out to find and buy the companies to achieve the goal.

The companies Neos merged together, some that go back 100 years, include brands such as MGM Transformers, PwrQ, States Manufacturing and VanTran Transformers.

Forgent joins a list of local companies that are benefiting from the data center expansion including Maple Plain-based Protolabs and St. Louis Park-based nVent Electric.

Beth Wozniak, CEO of nVent, said during an earnings conference call last week that the company’s data center sales jumped from about $600 million in 2024 to over $1 billion in 2025.

Protolabs, a digitally enabled manufacturer, pointed to work from companies making components for data centers as a big contributor to record fourth quarter revenue.

3M and Ecolab also have growing data center businesses.

Although in December Minnesota gained a public company in Park Dental Partners, it lost more than it gained as companies either merged into other companies or became private equity-owned.