The tech IPO window is open and the companies in the pipeline offer public investors an alternative to owning non-voting shares in money-losing Snap.
These pre-IPO enterprise software startups aren't makers of hot consumer apps like Snapchat, but sell technology and services to the world's biggest companies.
MuleSoft is first in line and will be closely watched as a test of the public markets appetite for enterprise tech stocks. The fast-growing, money-losing startup provides a platform to help companies stitch together disparate software applications, data, and devices.
It will offer 13 million shares priced between $12 to $14 on the New York Stock Exchange on an as yet to be made public date next week. At the midpoint of that range, MuleSoft — which will trade on the under the ticker MULE — would have a $1.8 billion valuation. That's up from the $1.5 billion valuation it garnered in its latest financing round led by Salesforce Ventures in May 2015.
MuleSoft — whose software competes with offerings from enterprise giants like IBM and Oracle — lost $50 million on $188 million in revenue in 2016, but its losses shrank from $65 million in 2015, and its revenue grew 70 percent from the previous year, according to its IPO filing. So investors will have to bet that trend will continue. MuleSoft counts Coca Cola, McDonalds, Spotify, Unilever and Bank of America as customers.
Alteryx, which sells data analytics software, is looking to raise up to $75 million in an initial public offering, according to its S-1 filing made public Feb. 24. Its products compete with software sold by incumbents like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
The company lost $24.26 million on revenue of $85.8 million in 2016, increasing both its losses ($21.45 million) and revenue ($53.8 million ) from the prior year. Last year, a large part of its expenditure — $57.59 million — was on sales and marketing. It will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker AYX.
These companies are among the tech business that have reportedly filed SEC IPO paperwork privately, taking advantage of JOBS Act provisions which allows companies with revenues of less than $1 billion to file privately.
Carbon Black, which makes anti-virus software and other security products, filed its confidential IPO paperwork last fall, according to a Sept. 2016 report from The Wall Street Journal. Its most recent private funding round, last year, reportedly valued the company at $600 million. (Carbon Black declined CNBC's request for comment.)
AppNexus, an ad-tech company last valued at $1.8 billion in 2015, has also filed its IPO paperwork confidentially, The Wall Street Journal reported in Nov. 2016. It is reportedly eyeing a valuation of between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, with a public filing revealing the company's financials expected as soon as the second quarter.
ForeScout, a security startup which helps customers see and manage devices on a network, filed its IPO paperwork confidentially, TechCrunch reported Feb 1. It is reportedly eyeing an IPO within the next few months an was last valued at $1 billion in Jan 2016.
Cloudera filed its private SEC paperwork for an initial public offering on Friday, according to Bloomberg citing sources familiar. The company is reportedly planning to go public later this year at an expected valuation of close to $4.1 billion, on a par with its latest private valuation at its last financing round in 2014.
Cloudera provides products and services that build on the open-source Hadoop technology, which is a method of storing and processing huge data sets, which was a buzzy technology in 2015 but has since lost some of its luster. Another Hadoop company, Hortonworks, went public in December 2014, and shares shot up 52% on its first day. Since then, however, the stock has performed poorly, and is trading down almost 40% from its debut price.