Business software company MuleSoft filed documents for its long-rumored initial public offering just before the long holiday weekend, the latest so-called tech “unicorn” to take its chances.
In its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the San Francisco company said it plans to raise $100 million, although that figure could change during the company’s road show with investors in coming weeks.
MuleSoft specializes in technology that integrates (or ties together) diverse business software systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). Companies often write custom code to do this, but the use of standard APIs makes such integrations easier to complete quickly as well as simpler to repeat. MuleSoft claims such customers as Amtrak, Citrix (CTXS), Coca-Cola (KO), StubHub, and Anheuser-Busch.
The company reported revenue of $57.6 million in 2014, $110.3 million in 2015, and $187.7 million in 2016. Over that period MuleSoft posted losses of $47.8 million, $65.4 million and $49.6 million, respectively. Overall, the company says its technology addresses a $29 billion market. MuleSoft will trade under the ticker “MULE.”
MuleSoft has raised $259 million in venture funding from such backers as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad, and New Enterprise Associates. Salesforce (CRM) Ventures led a $128 million Series G round of funding in 2015. That put its valuation at $1.5 billion at the time, making it another “unicorn”, or private startup valued at $1 billion or more. A word of caution however, some of last year’s much-touted unicorn IPOs including that of Nutanix (NTNX), did not measure up to the hype.
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MuleSoft’s software competes with integration offerings from IBM (IBM), SnapLogic, Tibco (TIBX) and others. Another player, Apigee, which went public in April 2015, was snapped up by Google last September for $625 million.
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As mentioned, this is a much-anticipated IPO. But pay attention: Another highly touted public launch, that of AppDynamics, was preempted in January, when Cisco swooped in to buy that company for $3.7 billion.
Date: (February 21, 2017 10:40 a.m.) This story was updated to include mention of other unicorn IPOs.
