Was 2019 the best year ever for B2B SaaS IPOs? There were 10 big listings for prominent B2B SaaS IPOs across a wide range of categories, including cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, observability, fintech, and business productivity. Zero Interest Rate Policies (ZIRPs) led to institutional investors seeking returns from equities and late-stage private companies on an IPO trajectory.
The class of 2019 B2B SaaS IPOs included a number of high performers that went on to dominate their respective market segments including Zoom, Crowdstrike, Slack, and Cloudflare. From a historical perspective, 2019 was one of the best years for public investors to participate in IPOs as they would benefit from the surge in SaaS pricing that occurred during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
In this article we summarize the top 10 B2B SaaS IPOs of 2019 providing the date of initial listing, exchange, ticker symbol, revenues, growth rate, and key SaaS metrics. We also share the IPO team including the CEO, CFO, investment banks, legal advisors, and auditors. The companies are listed in chronological order of the IPO date:
1) PagerDuty IPO
April 10th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on April 10, 2019 with the ticker symbol PD. Share prices popped almost 60% on PagerDuty’s first day as a listed company.
PagerDuty filed its S1 registration with the SEC on March 15th 2019.
Mission
“Our mission is to connect teams to real-time opportunities and elevate work to the outcomes that matter.”
“PagerDuty acts as the central nervous system for the digital enterprise. PagerDuty harnesses digital signals from virtually any software-enabled system or device, combines it with human response data, and orchestrates teams to take the right actions in real time. Our products help organizations improve operations, accelerate innovation, increase revenue, mitigate security risk, and deliver great customer experience.”
Products and Services
The San Francisco-based company helps its customers manage issues with their technology stack. PagerDuty’s incident management application detects issues, delivers alerts, and escalates to higher levels of engineering or management as time passes or the severity increases.
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
PagerDuty generated over $80M in revenue in the year leading up to its IPO, with an almost 50% year-over-year growth rate. The company was not profitable, but reported healthy gross margins of 85% before operating expenses.
Management Team
Jennifer Tejada led the IPO team for PagerDuty as the company’s CEO. A University of Michigan graduate she previously served as the President and CEO of Keynote Systems prior to joining PagerDuty. Other key members of the management team included Howard Wilson, CFO, Steven Chung, SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services, and Tim Armandpour, the Senior Vice President of Engineering.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan were among the lead investment bankers underwriting the offering. RBC Capital Markets, Allen & Company, KeyBanc Capital Markets, Piper Jaffray, and William Blair also participated.
- Law Firms – Cooley and Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe were the lead outside counsel for PagerDuty’s IPO.
- Auditors – Ernst & Young served as PagerDuty’s auditor in the four years leading up to the IPO starting in 2015.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
PagerDuty raised approximately $170M in venture capital and growth equity funding in Series A through D rounds prior to its IPO. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, T. Rowe Price, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
SaaS Metrics
At the time of its IPO, PagerDuty reported almost 11,000 customers. The company focused on large enterprise accounts, of which 200 generated more than $100,000 in ARR. PagerDuty relies on both new customer acquisition and expansion of existing accounts to drive top-line growth. The company boasted a dollar-based net retention rate of 139% in the fiscal year prior to PagerDuty’s IPO.
2) Zoom IPO
April 18th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Zoom began trading on the NASDAQ on April 18th, 2019, with the ticker symbol ZM. The IPO occurred about one month after Zoom filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on March 22nd. Zoom’s stock price soared 80% on the day of its initial public offering, and it enjoyed one of the highest multiples of any SaaS company – 50X enterprise value – on its debut.
Mission
“Our mission is to make video communications frictionless.”
“We provide a video-first communications platform that delivers happiness and fundamentally changes how people interact. We connect people through frictionless video, voice, chat and content sharing and enable face-to-face video experiences for thousands of people in a single meeting across disparate devices and locations. Our cloud-native platform delivers reliable, high-quality video that is easy to use, manage, and deploy, provides an attractive return on investment, is scalable, and easily integrates with physical spaces and applications. We believe that rich and reliable communications lead to interactions that build greater empathy and trust. We strive to live up to the trust our customers place in us by delivering a communications solution that “just works.” Our goal is to make Zoom meetings better than in-person meetings.”
Products and Services
Zoom Meetings is the company’s most widely used product, which allows users to conduct HD video meetings that can be accessed via phone or computer. It has become the de facto video conferencing application for business communications. Zoom also offers a range of add-on products, including video webinars, chat communications, conference room meetings, and a physical desktop phone.
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
Zoom reported $330M in annual revenues for the last fiscal year prior to its public listing. The company had one of the highest revenue growth rates at its IPO, at 118%. Zoom was among a short list of very few B2B SaaS companies that were both cash flow positive and profitable at the time of its initial public offering.
Management Team
Eric Yuan led the IPO team as President and CEO of Zoom. Yuan founded the company in 2011 after serving as a Vice President of Engineering at both Cisco and WebEx. Other key members of the management team included Kelly Steckelberg, the company’s CFO, Janine Pelosi, the Chief Marketing Officer, and Aparna Bawa, the General Counsel.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Lead investment bankers included Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse.
- Legal Counsel – Cooley and Wilson Sonsini were lead counsel for Zoom during the IPO process.
- Auditors – KPMG served as Zoom’s auditor in the three years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2016.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Zoom raised approximately $150M in outside capital in Series A through D rounds prior to its IPO. Investors included venture capital and growth equity firms such as Emergence Capital, Sequoia, Horizon Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures.
SaaS Metrics
In its IPO prospectus, Zoom reported that it had over 50,000 paying customers with more than 10 employees, including Capital One, Flextronics, Wells Fargo, and Yale University. Approximately 30% of its revenue came from large enterprise accounts generating more than $100,000 in revenue. The company follows a land-and-expand approach to grow accounts and boasted an impressive 140% net dollar expansion rate in the year preceding its IPO.
Learn more about Zoom
3) Fastly IPO
May 17th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Fastly’s initial public offering (IPO) was on May 17, 2019. Share prices rose 60% on the first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the ticker symbol FSLY. The IPO was slightly less than one month after the company filed it’s S-1 registration statement with the SEC on April 19th, 2019.
Mission
“Our mission is to fuel the next modern digital experience by providing developers with a programmable and reliable edge cloud platform that they adopt as their own.”
“Our powerful platform allows developers to write and deploy their custom code to push application logic to the edge. We believe that logic like A/B testing, URL redirects, paywall authentication, and location/language customization can all be executed faster and more efficiently at the edge.”
Products and Services
The San Francisco-based company introduced a new category of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) designed to optimize delivery of websites and applications from the edge of the Internet rather than centralized data centers. Fastly’s platform combines traditional Content Delivery Network (CDNs) with the capabilities of traditional hardware devices like Web Application Firewalls and Load Balancing devices.
Through Fastly’s local Points-of-Presence (PoPs), companies can accelerate website page load speeds, improve large file downloads, and real-time streaming of audio, video, and virtual reality content. Developers can write custom code that can be deployed at the edge of the network for more personalized experiences.
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
The company reported revenues of approximately $150M in the last full fiscal year before Fastly’s IPO with a year-over-year growth rate of almost 40%. The majority of Fastly’s revenue comes from usage-based pricing charges tied to the volume of data transmitted through its platform. The company also generates revenue from implementation and professional services fees.
Management Team
The IPO team was led by CEO Artur Bergman, who founded Fastly in March 2011. Before Fastly, Bergman was the CTO of Wikia, a knowledge-sharing platform. Other key members of the management team included Adriel Lares, the CFO, Joshua Bixby, SVP of Product and Marketing, and Wolfgang Maasberg, EVP of Sales.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse were among the investment banks leading the IPO.
- Legal Counsel – Cooley and Davis, Polk & Wardell were the lead counsel for the Fastly IPO.
- Auditors – Deloitte & Touche served as Fastly’s auditor for the five years leading up to the IPO starting in 2014.
SaaS Metrics
Fastly reported almost 1600 customers at the time of its IPO including high traffic apps. such as Ticketmaster, The New York Times, Wayfair, Spotify, and Hulu. The company generated 85% of its revenue from its 225+ enterprise accounts that produce more than $100K per year.
Customers typically purchase the core, programmable edge platform and then purchase additional value-added services such as load balancing, web security, and firewalls over time. The expansion from upsells to existing accounts drove an unusually high dollar-based net expansion rate of 147% and annual revenue retention rate of almost 99%.
Learn more about Fastly
4) Crowdstrike IPO
June 12th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Crowdstrike’s initial public offering (IPO) occurred on June 12, 2019, when the cybersecurity leader’s stock began trading on NASDAQ with the ticker symbol CRWD. Shares rose almost 100% on the opening day. It was the largest cybersecurity IPO in history at the time of its debut.
Crowdstrike filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC about a month earlier on May 14th, 2019.
Mission
“To protect our customers from breaches.”
“We believe we are defining a new category called the Security Cloud, with the power to transform the security industry much the same way the cloud has transformed the CRM, HR, and service management industries. With our Falcon platform, we created the first multi-tenant, cloud native, intelligent security solution capable of protecting workloads across on-premise, virtualized, and cloud-based environments running on a variety of endpoints such as laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, and Internet of Things, or IoT, devices. Our Falcon platform is composed of two tightly integrated proprietary technologies: our easily deployed intelligent lightweight agent and our cloud-based, dynamic graph database called Threat Graph.”
Products and Services
The Sunnyvale, California, company is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity providers. Crowdstrike deploys agents on its customers’ computers, including laptops, desktops, servers, and IoT devices running in the cloud or on-premise. The agents collect data and feed it to CrowdStrike’s cloud-based database, Threat Graph, which provides the company’s AI with a massive amount of data points it can use to detect, prevent, and respond to security threats.
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In the year prior to the IPO, Crowdstrike generated approximately $250M in revenue with a 110% year-over-year growth rate. The company generates revenue from two broad categories of products: 1) subscription offerings, which represented the majority of the top line, $220M of the $250M, and 2) professional services engagements, which
At the time of IPO, the company was unprofitable, reporting a loss of $140 million in the prior fiscal year.
Management Team
The IPO team was led by CEO George Kurtz, who was one of the co-founders. Prior to CrowdStrike, Kurtz founded another security company, Foundstone, which he sold to McAfee in 2004, then served as Executive Vice President and Worldwide Chief Technology Officer. Other key members of the management team include Burt Podbere, the CFO, Colin Black, the Chief Operating Officer, and Dmitri Alperovitch, the CTO and a co-founder.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Prior to IPO, CrowdStrike raised almost half a billion in funding in Series A through E rounds from investors such as Warburg Pincus, CapitalG, Accel, General Atlantic, and IVP.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Barclays were among the lead underwriters for the CrowdStrike IPO.
- Legal Counsel – Davis Polk & Wardwell and Cooley were lead counsel for the CrowdStrike IPO.
- Auditors – PricewaterhouseCoopers served as CrowdStrike’s auditor for the three years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2016.
SaaS Metrics
At the time of IPO, CrowdStrike counted 2500+ customers, including 44 of the Fortune 100. Customer count doubled year-over-year. Annual recurring revenue was $313M, more than doubling at a 121% year-over-year growth rate. ARR growth was fueled not only by new customer acquisition, but also by the expansion of existing accounts, as evinced by the company’s impressive Dollar-based Net Retention Rate of 147%.
Learn more about Crowdstrike
5) Slack IPO
June 20th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Slack’s initial public offering (IPO) occurred on June 20, 2019. The company’s stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol WORK. Slack’s IPO was a direct listing rather than a traditional investment bank-led underwriting process. Slack’s shares rose almost 50% on the opening day.
Slack filed its S-1 registration with the SEC on April 26, 2019.
Mission
“Slack is where work happens.
The most helpful explanation of Slack is often that it replaces the use of email inside the organization. Like email (or the Internet or electricity), Slack has very general and broad applicability. It is not aimed at any one specific purpose, but nearly anything that people do together at work.
Unlike email, however, most of this activity happens in team-based channels, rather than in individual inboxes. Channels provide a persistent record of conversations, data, documents, and application workflows relevant to a project or topic. Membership of a channel can change over time as people join or leave a project or organization, and users benefit from the accumulated historical information in a way an employee never could when starting with an empty email inbox. Depending on the size of the organization, this might provide tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times more access to information than is available to individuals working in environments where email is the primary means of communication.”
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In the company’s S-1 filing, Slack reported $400M in revenue in the last fiscal year prior to the IPO, an 82% year-over-year growth rate. One of the keys to the company’s success was the sales team’s ability to land and expand large enterprise accounts. Net dollar retention rate was 143% entering the year.
Management Team
The IPO team was led by Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and co-founder of Slack. Butterfield was the CEO of Flickr prior to its acquisition by Yahoo! in 2005. Other key members of the management team included Allen Shim, the CFO, Robert Frati, the SVP of Sales and Customer Success, and Cal Henderson, the CTO and co-founder.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Slack raised approximately $1.5B in venture capital and growth equity prior to its IPO. Investors included Accel, Andreesen Horowitz, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Social Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, and General Atlantic.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – None. Slack used a direct listing to offer its shares on the public markets rather than a traditional investment banker led approach.
- Legal Counsel – Goodwin Procter was listed as the outside counsel for the Slack IPO.
- Auditors – KPMG was the company’s auditor in the four years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2015.
SaaS Metrics
Over 10M daily active users (DAUs) from over 600,000 organizations in 150 countries. Users averaged 90 minutes of usage per workday and sent over 1B messages per week. 500K of the 600K customers were on the company’s freemium plan. However, there were 90K paying customers, including 575 with $100K+ ARR, representing 40% of revenue.
6) Dynatrace IPO
August 1st, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Dynatrace’s initial public offering (IPO) was on August 1, 2019 when the company’s shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol DT.
Mission
“Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today, the Internet is the lifeblood of business and the primary vehicle of commerce and communication for people around the world. While it was brilliantly architected to deliver fault tolerance and robust connectivity, it was not designed to deliver the security, millisecond performance, and reliability required for businesses today.
We have built a global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network services to businesses of all sizes around the world—making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing and integrating individual network hardware. We provide businesses a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across their on-premise, hybrid, cloud, and SaaS applications.”
Products and Services
Dynatrace provides cloud infrastructure and application observability, log analytics, and digital experience management to maximize the health and performance of apps running on cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and SAP Cloud Platform as well as on-premise applications.
“We offer the market-leading software intelligence platform, purpose-built for the enterprise cloud. As enterprises embrace the cloud to effect their digital transformation, our all-in-one intelligence platform is designed to address the growing complexity faced by technology and digital business teams. Our platform utilizes artificial intelligence at its core and advanced automation to provide answers, not just data, about the performance of applications, the underlying multi-cloud infrastructure, and the experience of our customers’ users. We designed our software intelligence platform to allow our customers to modernize and automate IT operations, develop and release high-quality software faster, and improve user experiences for better business outcomes.”
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In the last fiscal year, ThomaBravo, which later purchased the IPO, Dynatrace, reported $430M in revenue. At the time of the IPO, Dynatrace was in the process of transitioning from a traditional perpetual software license model to a subscription-style, recurring revenue business model. More than 80% of the company’s revenue was derived from subscriptions at the time of the IPO, with the remainder coming from perpetual licenses and professional services.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Dynatrace started as a venture-backed company, raising Series A and B rounds from investors such as Bain Capital and Bay Partners. During the financial crisis, Dynatrace was acquired by Compuware, which was later purchased by ThomaBravo. In 2019, ThomaBravo spun off Dynatrace in an IPO.
Management Team
The Dynatrace IPO team was led by John Van Siclen, the company’s CEO since 2008. A Princeton graduate, Van Siclen previously served as the CEO of Interwoven and Adesso Systems earlier in his career. Other members of the leadership team included Kevin Burns, the CFO, treasurer, and secretary, and Stephen Pace, the SVP of Global Sales, and Bernd Greifeneder, the CTO.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – The Dynatrace IPO lead bookrunners included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Citigroup.
- Legal Counsel – Outside advisors on the IPO included Goodwin Procter, Kirkland & Ellis, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.
- Auditors – The public accounting firm BDO served as Dynatrace’s auditors in the four years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2015.
SaaS Metrics
In the company’s S-1 registration filing with the SEC, it reported approximately 1800 customers generating more than $10K of ARR, including KeyBank, Kroger, and DISH Network. Dynatrace’s dollar-based net expansion rate was in the 120 to 140% range.
The company also reported on several different types of ARR (annual recurring revenue). Total ARR was $470M with a 40% growth rate in the year prior to the IPO.
7) Cloudflare IPO
September 13th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Cloudflare’s initial public offering (IPO) was on September 13, 2019. The company’s stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the ticker symbol NET. The stock price popped 20% on the opening day.
Cloudflare filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC announcing its intention to IPO on August 15, 2019.
Mission
“Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today, the Internet is the lifeblood of business and the primary vehicle of commerce and communication for people around the world. While it was brilliantly architected to deliver fault tolerance and robust connectivity, it was not designed to deliver the security, millisecond performance, and reliability required for businesses today.
We have built a global cloud platform that delivers a broad range of network services to businesses of all sizes around the world—making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing and integrating individual network hardware. We provide businesses a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across their on-premise, hybrid, cloud, and SaaS applications.”
Products and Services
The San Francisco-based company offers a range of products designed to enhance the security, performance, and reliability of customer websites, APIs, and mobile applications. Examples of Cloudflare’s products include load balancing, rate limiting, DDoS mitigation, and IoT security.
Cloudflare generates revenue through the sale of packaged SaaS subscriptions which bundle a mix of features, entitlements, and usage allotments at various price points.
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In the company’s S-1 filed on August 15, 2019, the company reported revenues of almost $200M in its last full fiscal year before the IPO, with year-over-year growth of over 40%. Cloudflare was not profitable in the years leading up to its listing.
Management Team
CEO Matthew Prince led the IPO team. With a Harvard MBA and Chicago JD, Prince co-founded the company in 2009. Cloudflare was Prince’s second startup. He also founded Unspam Technologies earlier in his career. Other key members of the management team included Michelle Zatlyn, the Chief Operating Officer, Thomas Seifert, the CFO, and Douglas Kramer, the General Counsel.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Cloudflare raised over $500M in outside capital prior to its initial public offering in Series A through E rounds. Prominent investors included Pelion, Venrock, NEA, Union Square, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan were among the lead underwriters for the Cloudflare IPO.
- Legal Counsel – Wilson Sonsini and Fenwick & West were the lead outside counsel for the Cloudflare IPO.
- Auditors – KPMG served as Cloudflare’s auditor in the five years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2019.
SaaS Metrics
In its IPO prospectus, Cloudflare counted almost 70,000 customers with over 300 larger accounts that generated over $100K in annual billings. A key success factor in the company’s growth has been its ability to acquire, retain, and grow large enterprise accounts. It claimed 10% of the Fortune 1000 as paying customers, including Walmart, IBM, Starbucks, and United Technologies. Cloudflare’s dollar-based net retention rate for the quarters leading up to the IPO was in the 110-115% range.
8) Ping Identity IPO
September 18th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
Ping Identity’s initial public offering was on September 18, 2019, when the company listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker symbol PING. The IPO followed a few weeks after Ping filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC. The stock price rose 30% on the opening day.
The Denver, Colorado-based company was founded in 2002. Ping grew quickly and raised more than $100M in venture capital through 2014. It was purchased by Vista Equity Partners in 2016, which sold a minority stake in the IPO at twice the valuation it purchased the company for.
Products and Services
Ping offers an Intelligent Identity Platform for customers, employees, and partners across mobile, cloud, IoT, and traditional on-premise applications. The company’s primary products and services include secure, single. sign-on (SSO), adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), access security for APIs, and profile directories.
The company describes its offerings as:
“Ping is pioneering Intelligent Identity. We enable secure access to any service, application or API from any device. Our Intelligent Identity Platform can leverage AI and ML to analyze device, network, application and user behavior data to make real-time authentication and security control decisions, enhancing the user experience. Our platform is designed to detect anomalies and automatically insert additional security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, only when necessary. We built our platform to meet the requirements of the most demanding enterprises. Our platform can be deployed across cloud, hybrid and on-premise infrastructures, and offers a comprehensive suite of turnkey integrations and is able to scale to millions of identities and thousands of cloud and on-premise applications.”
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
At the time of its IPO, Ping Identity had approximately $200 million in revenue, more than 90% of which was generated from subscription contracts. The company also generated approximately $15 million in professional services revenue.
Management Team
The Ping Identity IPO team was led by CEO Andre Durand, who founded the company in 2021. Prior to starting Ping, Durand founded the instant messaging company Jabber. Other key members of the management team included Raj Dani, Chief Financial Officer, B. Kristian Naagel, Chief Operating Officer, and Lauren Romer, the Chief Legal Officer.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Prior to its IPO, Ping Identity raised approximately $180M in outside capital from firms such as General Catalyst, Silicon Valley Bank, Triangle Peak, DFJ Growth, W Capital, and KKR.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, RBC Capital Markets, and Citigroup were among the lead investment bankers that underwrote the Ping Identity IPO.
- Legal Counsel – Kirland & Ellis, along with Cooley, were the lead advisors for the Ping Identity IPO.
- Auditors – PricewaterhouseCoopers served as Ping Identity’s auditor in the three years leading up to the IPO, starting in 2016.
SaaS Metrics
Ping had approximately $200M in ARR with approximately a 25% year-over-year growth rate in the 12 months prior to its IPO.
Ping’s dollar-based net retention exceeded 115% for the two years leading up to the IPO. One of Ping’s key areas of focus was growing enterprise accounts. In the fiscal year prior to the IPO, Ping had over 200 customers generating more than $250K ARR per year and had 25 customers exceeding $1M ARR.
9) DataDog IPO
September 19th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
DataDog’s initial public offering (IPO) was on September 19, 2019. The company listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol DDOG. The IPO was well-received, with the stock price popping 39% on the day of the opening.
Products and Services
SaaS observability platform for developers and IT operations. Key products include infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management. DataDog’s primary competitors include Splunk, Elastic, New Relic, and Dynatrace.
The company provided the following description in its IPO prospectus:
“Datadog is the monitoring and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams and business users in the cloud age. Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers’ entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, understand user behavior and track key business metrics.”
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In its S-1 registration form with the SEC filed on August 23rd, 2019, DataDog reported revenues of almost $200M for the latest fiscal year prior to the IPO, an 82% year-over-year revenue growth.
DataDog was not profitable or cash flow positive in the year prior to the IPO.
Management Team
DataDog’s IPO was led by Olivier Pomel, CEO and co-founder. A graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris, Pomel led technology for Wireless Generation, a SaaS company that was acquired by News Corp in 2010. Other key members of the leadershi pteam included Alexis Le-Quoc, the President and CTO, Amit Agarwal, the Chief Product Officer, and David Obstler, the CFO.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
DataDog raised approximately $150M in outside capital prior to its IPO in Series A through D rounds. Investors included Index Ventures, RTP Global, OpenView, and ICONIQ Capital.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – The lead investment bankers underwriting the IPO included Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse.
- Legal Counsel – Cooley, Davis Polk & Wardwell were listed on the prospectus cover as lead outside counsel.
- Auditors – Deloitte & Touche served as the company’s auditor for the years leading up to the IPO starting in 2016.
SaaS Metrics
DataDog counted 8800 customers, including large enterprises such as Comcast, Expedia, HSBC, and Starbucks. A key factor in DataDog’s growth was its land and expand strategy, as evidenced by the company’s impressive 146% dollar-based net retention rate. In its S1 filing, the company counted almost 600 enterprise accounts with $100K+ ARR and 40+ with $1M ARR.
Learn More about DataDog
Meritech Capital’s breakdown of the DataDog S-1 IPO registration filing.
10) Bill.com IPO
December 12th, 2019
Exchange and Ticker Symbol
BILL.com’s initial public offering (IPO) was on December 12, 2019 when the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol BILL. The stock price surged 69% on the opening day.
Products and Services
The Palo Alto-based company provides SaaS finance and accounting software that enables SMBs to manage the payables and receivables process, the associated invoices, and payments.
The company described its mission and offerings in its IPO prospectus as:
“Our mission is to make it simple to connect and do business. We are champions of small and midsize businesses (SMBs). We are a leading provider of cloud-based software that simplifies, digitizes, and automates complex back-office financial operations for SMBs. By transforming how SMBs manage their cash inflows and outflows, we create efficiencies and free our customers to run their businesses.”
The company’s marketecture diagram is shown below.
Revenue and Growth
In Bill’s S-1 registration filed with the SEC on November 15th, 2019, the company reported revenues of $108M in its latest fiscal year, a 67% increase from the prior year. Bill.com generates revenue from subscription fees for its SaaS applications, transaction fees from processing payments, and interest income from funds held for customers. Bill.com was not yet profitable at the time of IPO.
Management Team
DataDog’s IPO was led by Olivier Pomel, CEO and co-founder. A graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris, Pomel led technology for Wireless Generation, a SaaS company that was acquired by News Corp in 2010. Other key members of the leadershi pteam included Alexis Le-Quoc, the President and CTO, Amit Agarwal, the Chief Product Officer, and David Obstler, the CFO.
Pre-IPO Fundraising
Bill.com raised over $250M in venture capital and growth equity funding prior to its IPO in series A through H rounds. Investors included Emergence Capital, DCM Ventures, Icon Ventures, Financial Partners Fund, Scale Ventures, Bank of America, Scale Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, JP Morgan, Temasek Holdings, and Franklin Templeton.
External Advisors and Bankers
- Investment Bankers – Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities (Bank of America), Jeffries, and KeyBanc Capital Markets were among the lead underwriters for the Bill.com IPO.
- Legal Counsel – Outside counsel for the Bill.com IPO included Fenwick & West and Wilson Sonsini.
- Auditors – Ernst & Young served as the Bill.com’s auditor during the process.
SaaS Metrics
The company counted 81,000 customers, which include small and medium businesses as well as accounting firms that use BILL on behalf of their clients. The Fintech company’s software is also powers SMB offerings from financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and American Express.
Bill.com’s customers processed over 19M transactions representing $70B in dollar value during its prior fiscal year. The company reported a 110% net dollar-based retention rate and an average CAC payback period of five quarters.
