EC Cybersecurity – Venture Capital

SentinelOne’s upgraded IPO pricing is good news for Tiger, public markets and your local VC

June 28, 2021 by Alex Wilhelm

This post is by Alex Wilhelm from Fundings & Exits – TechCrunch

As the second quarter races to a close, we’re down to the wire for IPOs looking to get out before June ends. One such company is SentinelOne, a cybersecurity startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Redpoint, Tiger Global Management, Data Collective and Anchorage Capital, among others.
SentinelOne raised an ocean of capital while private, including nearly $500 million across two rounds in 2020. Its debut is therefore a huge liquidity event for a host of investing groups. And today, the cybersecurity unicorn had good news in the form of an upgrade to its IPO price range.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Last week, The Exchange wrote that the company’s IPO would be a “good heat check for the IPO market” given its rapid growth and pace of losses. How investors valued it would help explain the public market’s current appetite for loss-making startups. Today’s news implies healthy appetites.
SentinelOne raised its IPO price range this morning from $26 to $29 per share to $31 to $32 per share, a sizable lift to its valuation and IPO raise.
This morning, we’re unpacking the company’s new valuation range, thinking about SentinelOne’s growth and revenue results compared to similar public companies, and working to understand if the company is inexpensive, neutrally priced or expensive compared to current comps. Sound fun? It will be!
What’s SentinelOne worth?
Recall that when SentinelOne last raised capital it was valued (Read more...)

Why I’m hitting pause on ARR-focused coverage

March 12, 2021 by Alex Wilhelm
This post is by Alex Wilhelm from Fundings & Exits – TechCrunch

As 2021 kicked off, I reformulated a series of posts we published last year focused on startups that had reached the $100 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark. In our refreshed effort, we cut the target in half and dug up companies around the $50 million ARR threshold. The goal was to figure out what those firms were going through as they reached material scale, not after they had achieved effective pre-IPO status.
And the results were a bit medium.
While it was fun to chat with OwnBackup, Assembly, SimpleNexus and PicsArt, ultimately we were getting similar notes from each company: hiring is incredibly important as a company scales, founders have to cede decision-making, and as startups grow from $30 million ARR to $50 million or more, they must harden internal systems and build business infrastructure.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
All that made sense, but it wasn’t entirely scintillating. I meant to keep the project going; I had publicly made noise about the effort and had a few interviews in the bag that were collecting dust (and emails from various PR folks).
But they wound up in the Google Docs graveyard as the news cycle somehow managed to keep accelerating, meaning that the time required to execute the somewhat effort-intensive series dried up as I held on for dear life as the early, middle, late and IPO-stage startup (Read more...)

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