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Q3 IPO cycle starts strong with Couchbase pricing and Kaltura relisting

by Alex Wilhelm

Today we have new filings from Couchbase and Kaltura: Couchbase set an initial price range for its IPO, something we’ve been waiting for, and Kaltura’s offering is back from hiatus with a new price range and some fresh financial information to boot.

Both bits of news should help us get a handle on how the Q3 2021 IPO cycle is shaping up at the start.

TechCrunch has long expected the third quarter’s IPO haul to prove strong; investors said as 2020 closed that quarters one, three and four would prove very active in terms of public market exits this year. Then the second quarter surpassed expectations, with more companies going public than at least some market observers anticipated.

With that in mind, you can imagine why the newly launched Q3 could prove an active period.

So! Let’s start with a dig into the filing from NoSQL provider Couchbase, working to understand its first price range and what the numbers may say about market demand for technology debuts. Here’s our first look at the company’s value. Then we are taking the Kaltura saga back up, checking into the pricing and second-quarter results from the technology company that provides video streaming software and services.

Frankly, I’ve been waiting for these filings to drop. So, let’s cut the chat and get into the numbers:

Couchbase’s IPO price range

In its new S-1/A filing, Couchbase reports that it anticipates a $20 to $23 per share IPO price. With a maximum sale (Read more...)

Network security startup ExtraHop skips and jumps to $900M exit

by Ron Miller

Last year, Seattle-based network security startup ExtraHop was riding high, quickly approaching $100 million in ARR and even making noises about a possible IPO in 2021. But there will be no IPO, at least for now, as the company announced this morning it has been acquired by a pair of private equity firms for $900 million.

The firms, Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners, are buying a security solution that provides controls across a hybrid environment, something that could be useful as more companies find themselves in a position where they have some assets on-site and some in the cloud.

The company is part of the narrower Network Detection and Response (NDR) market. According to Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop’s chief technology officer and co-founder, it’s a technology that is suited to today’s threat landscape, “I will say that ExtraHop’s north star has always really remained the same, and that has been around extracting intelligence from all of the network traffic in the wire data. This is where I think the network detection and response space is particularly well-suited to protecting against advanced threats,” he told TechCrunch.

The company uses analytics and machine learning to figure out if there are threats and where they are coming from, regardless of how customers are deploying infrastructure. Rothstein said he envisions a world where environments have become more distributed with less defined perimeters and more porous networks.

“So the ability to have this high quality detection and response capability utilizing next generation machine (Read more...)

Confluent’s IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets

by Alex Wilhelm

Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million last April.

What does Confluent do? It built a streaming data platform on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. In addition to its open-source roots, Confluent has a free tier of its commercial cloud offering to complement its paid products, helping generate top-of-funnel inflows that it converts to sales.

Kafka itself emerged from a LinkedIn internal project in 2011. As we wrote at the time of Confluent’s $50 million Series C in 2017, the open-source project was designed to move massive amounts of data at the professional social network:

At its core, Kafka is simply a messaging system, created originally at LinkedIn, that’s been designed from the ground up to move massive amounts of data smoothly around the enterprise from application to application, system to system or on-prem to cloud — and deal with extremely high message volume.

Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps wrote at the time of the funding that events streaming is at the core of every business, reaching sales and other core business activities that occur in real time that go beyond storing data in a database after the fact.

“[D]atabases have long helped to store the current state (Read more...)

As UiPath closes above its final private valuation, CFO Ashim Gupta discusses his company’s path to market

by Alex Wilhelm

After an upward revision, UiPath priced its IPO last night at $56 per share, a few dollars above its raised target range. The above-range price meant that the unicorn put more capital into its books through its public offering.

For a company in a market as competitive as robotic process automation (RPA), the funds are welcome. In fact, RPA has been top of mind for startups and established companies alike over the last year or so. In that time frame, enterprise stalwarts like SAP, Microsoft, IBM and ServiceNow have been buying smaller RPA startups and building their own, all in an effort to muscle into an increasingly lucrative market.

In June 2019, Gartner reported that RPA was the fastest-growing area in enterprise software, and while the growth has slowed down since, the sector is still attracting attention. UIPath, which Gartner found was the market leader, has been riding that wave, and today’s capital influx should help the company maintain its market position.

It’s worth noting that when the company had its last private funding round in February, it brought home $750 million at an impressive valuation of $35 billion. But as TechCrunch noted over the course of its pivot to the public markets, that round valued the company above its final IPO price. As a result, this week’s $56-per-share public offer wound up being something of a modest down-round IPO to UiPath’s final private valuation.

Robotic process automation platform UiPath raises $750M at $35B valuation

Then, a (Read more...)

Understanding Toast’s expected IPO through the lens of Olo’s 2020 results

by Alex Wilhelm

Boston-based Toast has been on a roller coaster over the last year.

From raising $400 million in February 2020 at a nearly $5 billion valuation, the company cut staff in March after COVID-19 turned its business upside down. Toast had recorded 109% revenue growth in 2019.

Toast’s ups and downs were hardly over. The company has since recovered greatly since those early-COVID layoffs. Evidence of that comes in the form of the company’s reportedly-pending IPO and reportedly possible $20 billion valuation.

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It feels like every IPO these days is blasting final private valuations out of the water, but Toast’s ascent from layoffs to an IPO in under a year is an impressive turnaround. And that’s if it prices flat at $5 billion. Anything higher is just cream for the software unicorn.

Until we get the S-1, we won’t know the full details. That said, anotherr company that operates in a similar part of the restaurant technology market is going public at the moment, and we have its S-1 filing: New York-based Olo.

This morning, while we await the numbers from Toast that should prove as interesting as Airbnb’s own COVID-19 recovery, let’s peek at Olo’s results to get a taste of the market that Boston’s leading startup dealt with in 2020.

Olo’s IPO

Olo isn’t a company that has been very loud in recent (Read more...)