Carbonite raises $62.5m in offering

“It is obvious that Carbonite stock is not going to get the reception it would have gotten a few months ago,’’ said David Menlow, the president of IPOfinancial.com, a Millburn, N.J., firm that tracks IPOs.

Carbonite is not the only company fighting against a down market. Twelve IPOs were set to price this week, but by late yesterday afternoon, eight had been postponed or withdrawn. None were from Massachusetts companies.

“The market tumult and negative investor sentiment are making companies, their investors, and their bankers think twice about IPOing, especially given uncertainty about where the overall economy is going,’’ said Anand Sanwal, cofounder of CB Insights, a New York information services firm.

Stock prices have been fluctuating dramatically over the last few weeks, creating a marketplace that many young companies clearly feel is too distracted to focus on a company’s public market debut. The Dow Jones industrial average fell over 519 points yesterday, after rising 430 points on Tuesday.

Menlow said yesterday’s price reduction was one that he expected; the alternative would have been to postpone the IPO entirely.

Carbonite first disclosed its plan to go public in May. The company, founded in 2005, lets consumers and small businesses back up their computer files by transmitting them over the Internet to a remote data center.

Before the stock market’s recent bout of instability, this year was shaping up as a good one for IPOs, with 91 initial offerings in the United States so far in 2011, compared with 77 during the same period last year.

Four of those offerings have been from Massachusetts companies. The biggest and most recent was from Dunkin’ Brands Group, the Canton parent of the Dunkin’ Donuts restaurant chain. Launched at $19 a share, the stock rose nearly 50 percent on its first day, and yesterday closed at $27.37. Zipcar Inc., STAG Industrial Properties, and BG Medicine Inc. have also gone public this year. The prospects for Carbonite were made more challenging by the fact that it has yet to turn a profit.

The IPO market is particularly tough on companies that “are pitching a vision of growth and profitability one day sometime in the uncertain future,’’ said CB Insight’s Sanwal.

Yesterday, the accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP issued a statement that “increasing uncertainty around the global economic outlook may impact investor appetite for IPOs in the short term, hindering continued momentum in the US IPO market.’’

In the release, PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Henri Leveque said that although the firm expected 2011 to be a better year for IPOs than 2010, “disruptions in the overall market and a variety of recent macroeconomic events may present considerable challenges for companies looking to execute an IPO in the coming months.’’

Carbonite plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol CARB.

D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.