As expected, BigCommerce has filed to go public. The Austin, Texas, based e-commerce company raised over $200 million while private. The company’s IPO filing lists a $100 million placeholder figure for its IPO raise, giving us directional indication that this IPO will be in the lower, and not upper, nine-figure range.
BigCommerce, similar to public market darling Shopify, provides e-commerce services to merchants. Given how enamored public investors are with its Canadian rival, the timing of BigCommerce’s debut is utterly unsurprising and is prima facie intelligent.
Of course, we’ll know more when it prices. Today, however, the timing appears fortuitous.
The numbers
BigCommerce is a SaaS business, meaning that it sells a digital service for a recurring payment. For more on how it derives revenue from customers, head here. For our purposes what matters is that public investors will classify it along with a very popular — today’s trading notwithstanding — market segment.
Starting with broad strokes, here’s how the company performed in 2019 compared to 2018, and Q1 2020 in contrast to Q1 2019:
In 2019, BigCommerce’s revenue grew to $112.1 million, a gain of around 22% from its 2018 result of $91.9 million.
In Q1 2020, BigCommerce’s revenue grew to $33.2 million, up around 30% from its Q1 2019 result of $25.6 million.
BigCommerce didn’t grow too quickly in 2019, but its Q1 2020 expansion pace is much better. BigCommerce will file an S-1/A with more information in Q2 2020, we expect; it can’t go public without sharing more about its recent financial performance.
If the company’s revenue growth acceleration continues in the most recent period — bearing in mind that e-commerce as a segment has proven attractive to many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic — BigCommerce’s IPO timing would appear even more intelligent than it did at first blush. Investors love growth acceleration.
Moving from revenue growth to revenue quality, BigCommerce’s Q1 2020 gross margins came in at 77.5%, a solid SaaS result. In Q1 2019 its gross margin was 76.8%, a slightly worse figure. Still, improving gross margins are popular as they indicate that future cash flows will grow at a faster clip than revenues, all else held equal.
In 2018 BigCommerce lost $38.9 million on a GAAP basis. Its net loss expanded modestly to $42.6 million in 2020, a larger dollar figure in gross terms, but a slimmer percent of its yearly top line. You can read those results however you’d like. In Q1 2020, however, things got better, as the company’s GAAP net loss fell to $4 million from its year-ago Q1 result of $10.5 million.
The BigCommerce big commerce business is growing more slowly than I had anticipated, but its overall operational health is better than I expected.
A few other notes, before we tear deeper into its S-1 filing tomorrow morning. BigCommerce’s adjusted EBITDA, a metric that gives a distorted, partial view of a company’s profitability, improved along similar lines to its net income, falling from -$9.2 million in Q1 2019 to -$5.7 million in Q1 2020.
The company’s cash flow is, akin to its adjusted EBITDA, worse than its net loss figures would have you guess. BigCommerce’s operating activities consumed $10 million in Q1 2020, an improvement from its Q1 2019 operating cash burn of $11.1 million.
The company is further in debt than many SaaS companies, but not so far as to be a problem. BigCommerce’s long-term debt, net of its current portion, was just over $69 million at the end of Q1 2020. It’s not a nice figure, per se, but it is one small enough that a good IPO haul could sharply reduce while still providing good amounts of working capital for the business.
Investors listed in its IPO document include Revolution, General Catalyst, GGV Capital, and SoftBank.
We’re a few days away from kicking off TC Early Stage 2020. Join us on July 21-22 for a two-day online masterclass designed to help early-stage startup founders build their business and keep moving forward.
Bonus:Buy your ticket now and you’ll get a free annual membership to Extra Crunch, our subscription program focused on startups, founders and investors with more than 100 exclusive articles published per month. Read how-tos, weekly investor surveys, IPO analysis and in-depth interviews with experts on fundraising, growth, monetization and other core startup topics.
Here’s what you can expect from TC Early Stage. More than 50 experts across the startup ecosystem will lead interactive workshops focused on essential topics and skills that all pre-seed through Series A founders need to know.
We’re talking everything from effective fundraising, how to scale and marketing tactics that help you stand out from the herd to the nuts-and-bolts of tech stack security, smart hiring and the ins-and-outs of structuring term sheets.
Need an example or two? Here’s a taste.
How to avoid 1,000 landmines: When you’re starting your company, there are thousands of small, avoidable mistakes that can turn success into failure. Learn how to navigate around those and maximize your chance of success with key learnings from Garry Tan, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital.
Hiring your early engineers: The first few employees determine a startup’s trajectory. Learn the dos and don’ts of hiring your early engineers from entrepreneur and investor Ali Partovi. And hear how these hiring decisions can determine not only the type of culture you build for your employees, but also the overall success of your company.
Make haste because some sessions are already filled. We’re limiting capacity to keep the workshops smaller so you can get the most out of your experience. Good news: All pass holders will have exclusive video access to all the sessions after the event ends. No FOMO for you.
Buy your Early Stage pass, score a free annual membership to Extra Crunch and dive into a business-building masterclass designed just for you.
If you are already an existing annual or two-year Extra Crunch member and have not yet bought a ticket to Early Stage, you can reach out to extracrunch@techcrunch.com to request a 20% off discount. If you are an annual or two-year member and purchased an Early Stage ticket without the 20% off discount, we’re happy to extend the length of your existing membership by 6 months for free by contacting extracrunch@techcrunch.com.
Alternately, if you are an existing monthly Extra Crunch member, we’re happy to extend the length of your membership by a year for free; however, you won’t be able to claim the 20% off for an event ticket for Early Stage. You will be eligible for the 20% off event tickets for Disrupt and other future TechCrunch events. Please contact extracrunch@techcrunch.com if you are an existing monthly customer and want to take advantage of the membership extension.
The stakes keep getting higher for American discount brokerage Robinhood, which today disclosed that it has added hundreds of millions of dollars to its previously disclosed funding round.
Including the $280 million that the company had already announced, Robinhood said that it was “pleased to share” that it “raised an additional $320 million in subsequent closings.” Its now $600 million funding round brings its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion. Fortune first reported the news.
(A detail, but the new capital is part of the same round as it was raised at the same price. TechCrunch reported when the company’s $280 million round was announced, the fintech company was worth $8.3 billion. Another $300 million in capital at a flat share price means that the company’s valuation should have risen by only the dollar amount added. As it did.)
What is inescapable is that Robinhood is having one hell of a year. When it might go public isn’t clear, especially as the private company is having no problem raising capital without an IPO. But as its value continues to rise, it becomes an increasingly remote acquisition target.
The second quarter’s venture capital results are coming into focus.
The Exchange will have more notes on Q2’s venture results this week, but this morning we’re digging into our first dataset concerning what happened in the world of private capital from April through June.
Crunchbase News — a place I used to work, it feels fair to note — ran its usual dig through the quarter’s venture results, effectively coming up with two answers to the question of what happened in Q2 VC. As it turns out, a single company’s fundraising made the quarter’s results look far better than they really were. Once we strip out that firm’s nonventure funding rounds, a clearer picture emerges.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, and now you can receive it in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which will drop every Saturday starting July 25.
If you discount Reliance Jio’s epic — and continuing — ability to attract billions of dollars, the private investment market was slack in the second quarter. Per Crunchbase News, including the Reliance Jio deals, “Crunchbase recorded $69.5 billion invested across all funding stages for the second quarter specifically. This is up 17% quarter-over-quarter and down 2% year-over-year.” (Crunchbase has moved away from making projections, notably, and now discloses reported data in its quarterly results).
A gain of about one-sixth from Q1 2020 results was probably not what you expected, given the quarter’s nearly comical turbulence. But, with Reliance Jio’s fundraising bacchanal stripped out, results are much worse.
Let’s talk about whether it’s fair to lean more on Reliance Jio-free data, and dig into what the data means for startups around the globe. We’ll also look at a few other megarounds from the period to see if there are any other distortive funding events lurking in the data.
The bad news
Final global Q2 data exclusive of Reliance Jio’s Q2 deals, per Crunchbase data, shows investment declines in the period of -9% compared to Q1 2020, and -23% compared to the year-ago quarter. While some of that will be due to reporting lag — the thing that projections were initially built to countermand — the dips are still stark.
Global Q2 VC does not look strong from this perspective.
Editor’s note:Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.
You could almost hear the internet cracking apart this week as international businesses pulled away from Hong Kong and the US considered a ban on TikTok. Software can no longer eat the entire world like it had attempted last decade. Startups across tech-focused industries face a new reality, where local markets and efforts are more protected and supported by national governments. Every company now has a smaller total addressable market, whether or not it succeeds in it.
Facebook, for example, appears to be getting an influx of creators who are worried about losing TikTok audiences, as Connie Loizos investigated this week. This might mean more users, engagement and ultimately revenue for many consumer startups, and any other companies that rely on paid marketing through Facebook’s valuable channels. But it means fewer platforms to diversify to, in case you don’t want to rely on Facebook so much for your business.
As trade wars look more and more like cold wars, it also means that Facebook itself will have a more limited audience than it once hoped to offer its own advertisers. After deciding to reject requests from Hong Kong-based Chinese law enforcement, it seems to be on the path to getting blocked in Hong Kong like it is on the mainland. But as with other tech companies, it doesn’t really have a choice — the Chinese government has pushed through legal changes in the city that allow it to arrest anyone in the world if it claims they are organizing against it. Compliance with China would bring on government intervention in the US and beyond, among other reasons why doing so is a non-starter.
This also explains why TikTok itself already pulled out of Hong Kong, despite being owned by mainland China-based Bytedance. The company is still reeling from getting banned in India last week and this maneuver is trying to the subsidiary look more independent. Given that China’s own laws allow its government to access and control private companies, expect many to find that an empty gesture.
Startups should plan for things to get harder in general. See: the next item below.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Student visas have become the next Trump immigration target
International students will not be allowed to stay enrolled at US universities that offer only remote classes this coming academic year, the Trump administration decided this past week. As Natasha Mascarenhas and Zack Whittaker explore, many universities are attempting a hybrid approach that tries to allow some in-person teaching without creating a community health problem.
International students have been allowed to take online classes during the spring and summer due to the COVID-19 crisis, but that will end this fall. The new order will force many international students at schools that are only offering remote online classes to find an “immigration plan B” or depart the U.S. before the fall term to avoid being deported.
At many top universities, international students make up more than 20% of the student body. According to NAFSA, international students contributed $41 billion to the U.S. economy and supported or created 458,000 jobs during the 2018-2019 academic year. Apparently, the current administration is continuing to “throw out the baby with the bathwater” when it comes to immigration.
Universities are scrambling as they struggle with this newfound untenable bind. Do they stay online only to keep their students safe and force their international students to leave their homes in this country? Or do they reopen to save their students from deportation, but put their communities’ health at risk?
For students, it means finding another school, scrambling to figure out a way to depart the States (when some home countries will not even allow them to return), or figuring out an “immigration plan B.”
Who knows how many startups will never exist because the right people didn’t happen to be at the right place at the right time together? What everyone does know is that remote-first is here to stay.
A few tech trends seem unstoppable despite any geopolitics, and one seems to be the universal human goal of making enterprise software suck less. (Okay, nearly universal.) Alex Nichols and Jesse Wedler of CapitalG explain why now is the time for no code software and what the impact will bel, in a very popular article for Extra Crunch this week. Here’s their setup:
First, siloed cloud apps are sprawling out of control. As workflows span an increasing number of tools, they are arguably getting more manual. Business users have been forced to map workflows to the constraints of their software, but it should be the other way around. They need a way to combat this fragmentation with the power to build integrations, automations and applications that naturally align with their optimal workflows.
Second, architecturally, the ubiquity of cloud and APIs enable “modular” software that can be created, connected and deployed quickly at little cost composed of building blocks for specific functions (such as Stripe for payments or Plaid for data connectivity). Both third-party API services and legacy systems leveraging API gateways are dramatically simplifying connectivity. As a result, it’s easier than ever to build complex applications using pre-assembled building blocks. For example, a simple loan approval process could be built in minutes using third-party optical character recognition (a technology to convert images into structured data), connecting to credit bureaus and integrating with internal services all via APIs. This modularity of best-of-breed tools is a game changer for software productivity and a key enabler for no code.
Finally, business leaders are pushing CIOs to evolve their approach to software development to facilitate digital transformation. In prior generations, many CIOs believed that their businesses needed to develop and own the source code for all critical applications. Today, with IT teams severely understaffed and unable to keep up with business needs, CIOs are forced to find alternatives. Driven by the urgent business need and assuaged by the security and reliability of modern cloud architecture, more CIOs have begun considering no code alternatives, which allow source code to be built and hosted in proprietary platforms.
Photo: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
Palantir has finally filed to go public
It’s 16 years old, worth $26 billion and widely used by private and public entities of all types around the world, but this employer of thousands is counted as a startup tech unicorn, because, well, it was one of the pioneers of growing big, raising bigger, and staying private longer. Aileen Lee even mentioned Palantir as one of the 39 examples that helped inspire the “unicorn” term back in 2013. Now the secretive and sometimes controversial data technology provider is finally going to have its big liquidity event — and is filing confidentially to IPO, which means the finances are still staying pretty secret.
Alex Wilhelm went ahead and pieced together its funding history for Extra Crunch ahead of the action, and concluded that “Palantir seems like the Platonic ideal of a unicorn. It’s older than you’d think, has a history of being hyped, its valuation has stretched far beyond the point where companies used to go public, and it appears to be only recently growing into its valuation.”
It also appears to be one of the unicorns that has seen a lot of upside lately. It has been in the headlines recently for cutting big-data deals with governments for pandemic work, on top of a long-standing relationship with the US military and other arms of the government. As with Lemonade, Accolade and a range of other IPOing tech companies that we have covered in recent weeks, it is presumably in a positive business cycle and primed to take advantage of an already receptive market.
(Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Meaningful change from BLM
In an investor survey for Extra Crunch this week, Megan Rose Dickey checked in with eight Black investors about what they are investing in, in the middle of what feels like a new focus on making the tech industry more representative of the country and the world. Here’s how Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital responded when Megan asked what meaningful change might come from the recent heightened attention on the Black Lives Matter movement.
I happen to be on the more optimistic side of things. I’m not at a hundred percent optimistic, but I’m close to that. I think that there’s an undeniable unflinching resolve right now. I think that if we were to go back to status quo, I would be incredibly surprised. I guess I would not be shocked, unfortunately, but I would be surprised. It would give me pause about the effectiveness of any of the work that we do if this moment fizzles out and doesn’t create change. I do think that there is going to be a shift. I can already feel it. I know that more people who are representative of this country are going to be writing checks, whether through being hired, or taken through the ranks, or starting their own funds, and our own funds. I think there’s more and more capital that’s going to flow to underrepresented founders. That alone, I think, will be a huge shift.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
We wound up having more to talk about than we had time for but we packed as much as we could into 34 minutes. So, climb aboard with Danny, Natasha and myself for another episode of Equity.
Before we get into topics, a reminder that if you are signing up for Extra Crunch and want to save some money, the code “equity” is your friend. Alright, let’s get into it:
Robinhood is back in the news this week after a New York Times piece dug into its history, product decisions and more. Tidbits galore are to be had, but the Equity crew wanted to debate the morality of providing exotic financial tooling to less-experienced users.
We followed that debate with a dive into immigration, the latest news from the government and our takes on the matter. TechCrunch has covered the recent news, and provided some context on the broader concept. Our takeaway is that doing self-defeating things for no reason isn’t brilliant for the country as a whole.
Postmates has a home! After winding up somewhere in the middle of the pack of the on-demand cohort a few years back, the rise of DoorDash put Postmates in a pickle. Happily, Uber was on hand to de-brine the unicorn for $2.65 billion in stock. That’s a bit more money than Postmates’ last valuation. What we want to know next is how the sale price impacted common stockholders. Email us if you know.
Ahead of parsing Q2 venture capital data, we got a look this week into the VC world’s take on making deals over Zoom. A few months ago it was an open question whether VCs would simply stop making new investments if they couldn’t chop it up in person with founders. That, it turns out, was mostly wrong.
This week we learned that most VCs are open to making remote deals happen, even if 40% of VCs have actually done so. This raises a worrying question: If only 40% of VCs have actually made a fully remote deal, how many deals happened in Q2?
Judging from my inbox over the past few months, it’s been an active period. But we can’t lean on anecdata for this topic; The Exchange will parse Q2 VC data next week, hopefully, provided that we can scrape together the data points we need to feel confident in our take. More soon.
Private markets
As TechCrunch reported Friday, some startups are delaying raising capital for a few quarters. They can do this by limiting expenses. The question for startups that are doing this is what shape they’ll be in when they do surface to hunt for fresh funds; can they still grow at an attractive pace while trying to extend their runway through burn conservation?
I don’t know yet how to numerically drill into the available venture data to tell if we’re really seeing an extension wave, but do let me know if you have any notes to share. And, to be completely clear, the above rounds could easily be merely random and un-thematic, so please don’t read into them more deeply than that they were announced in the last few days and match something that we’re watching.
Public markets
On the public markets front, the news is all good. Tech stocks are up in general, and software stocks set some new record highs this week. It’s nearly impossible to recall how scary the world was back in March and April in today’s halcyon stock market run, but it was only a few months back that stocks were falling sharply.
The return-to-form has helped a number of companies go public this year like Vroom, Accolade, Agora, and others. This week was another busy period for startups, former startups, and other companies looking to go out.
The IPO waters are so warm that Lemonade is still up more than 100% from its IPO price. So long as growth companies that are miles from making money can command rich valuations, expect companies to keep running through the public market’s door.
There’s fun stuff on the horizon. Coinbase might file later this year, or in early 2021. And the Airbnb IPO is probably coming within four or five quarters. Gear up to read some SEC filings.
Funding rounds worth noting
The coolest funding round of the week was obviously the one that I wrote about, namely the $2.2 million that MonkeyLearn put together from a pair of lead investors. But other companies raised money, and among them the following investments stood out:
TruePill raised $25 million in a Series B. In the modern world it seems batty to me that I have to get off my ass, go to Walgreens or CVS, wait in line, and then ask someone to please sell me Claritin D. What an enormous waste of time. TruePill, which does pharma delivery, can’t get here fast enough. Also, investors in TruePill are probably fully aware that Amazon spent $1 billion on PillPack just a few year ago.
From the slightly off-the-wall category, this headline from TechCrunch: “UK’s Farewill raises $25M for its new-approach online will writing, funerals and other death services.” Farewill is a startup name that is so bad it probably works; I won’t forget it any time soon, even though I don’t live in the U.K.! And this deal goes to show how big the internet really is. There’s so much demand for digital services that a company with Farewill’s particular focus can put together enough revenue growth to command a $25 million Series B.
Finally, TechCrunch’s Ron Miller covered a $50 million investment into OwnBackup. What matters about this deal was how Ron spoke about it: “OwnBackup has made a name for itself primarily as a backup and disaster-recovery system for the Salesforce ecosystem, and today the company announced a $50 million investment.” What to take from that? That Salesforce’s ecosystem is maybe bigger than we thought.
That’s The Exchange for the week. Keep your eye on SaaS valuations, the latest S-1 filings, and the latest fundings. Chat Monday.
Fringe is a new company pitching employers on a service offering lifestyle benefits for their employees in addition to, or instead of, more traditional benefits packages.
“We didn’t think it made sense that employees need to be sick, disabled, dead or 65+ to benefit from their benefits,” wrote Fringe chief executive Jordan Peace, in an email.
The Richmond, Virginia-based company was founded by five college friends from Virginia Tech rounded up by Peace and Jason Murray, who serves as the company’s head of Strategy and Finance. The two men previously owned a financial planning firm called Greenhouse Money, which worked with small businesses to set up benefits packages and retirement accounts.
During that time, the two men had a revelation… employees at these small and medium-sized businesses didn’t just want retirement or healthcare benefits, they wanted perks that were more applicable to their day-to-day lives. Because Murray and Peace couldn’t find a company that offered a flexible benefits package on things like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu subscriptions, Uber rides, Grubhub orders or Instacart deliveries, they built one themselves.
As they grew their business they brought in college friends, including Isaiah Goodall as the vice president of partnerships, Chris Luhrman as the vice president of operations and Andrew Dunlap as the head of product.
Peace and Murray first launched the business in 2018 and now count over 100 delivery services, exercise apps, cleaning services and other apps of convenience among their offerings.
For their part, employers pay $5 per employee covered per month and set up a monthly stipend (that may or may not be subtracted from a total benefits package) of somewhere between $50 and $200 that employees can spend on subscription services.
It’s a pitch to employers that Peace says is especially compelling as office culture changes in the wake of massive office closures and work-from-home orders from major U.S. companies as a response to the COVID-19 epidemic.
“In-office perks and even most ‘off-site’ perks (gyms, massage spas, etc.) are all null and void,” wrote Peace. “Even post-COVID, it’s highly likely that many of these aspects of office culture will bear less significance with many CEOs vowing to allow ‘WFH forever.’ This means companies need a way to package their office culture and ship them home. Fringe is perfectly positioned for this and determined to be the first name that comes to mind to provide a solution.”
Peace sees this as the next step in the evolution of benefits offerings for employees. He traces its legacy to the development of private health insurance and 401k retirement plans. “After another 40 years lifestyle benefits are the newest breakthrough — and like its predecessors, will be almost universally adopted in the next 5 years,” Peace wrote.
As expected, fintech company nCino has raised its IPO price range. The North Carolina-based banking software firm now expects to sell its shares for between $28 and $29 per share, far more than its initial price range of $22 to $24 per share.
At its $28 to $29 per-share price interval, nCino is worth $2.50 billion to $2.59 billion, sharply more than its preceding $1.96 billion to $2.14 billion range.
The valuation makes more sense for the company, given its growth rate, revenue scale and how the market is currently valuing similar companies. As TechCrunch wrote earlier this week, concerning the SaaS company’s scale and value (emphasis ours):
Annualizing the company’s Q1 (the April 30, 2020 period) revenue results, nCino’s $178.9 million run rate would give it a revenue multiple of 11x to 12x at its expected IPO prices, a somewhat modest result by current standards.
Indeed, as nCino grew about 50% from Q1 2019 to Q1 2020, it feels light. The firm’s GAAP losses are slim compared to revenue as well for a SaaS business, though the company’s operating cash burn did grow from $4.6 million in its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019 to $9 million in its next fiscal year. Its numbers are mostly good, with some less-than-perfect results. Still, given its growth rate, an 11x-12x revenue multiple feels modest; that figure rises, of course, if we use a trailing revenue figure instead of our annualized number.
It would not be a shock, then, if nCino targets a higher price interval for its shares before it formally prices.
With its new IPO price range, nCino’s implied revenue multiple is now 14x to 14.5x, figures that seem far closer to present-day norms.
Now the question for nCino, which is expected to price and trade next week, is whether it can price above its raised range. Given some recent historical precedent, a $1 per-share price beat above its raised interval would not be a shock.
nCino is one of two companies we’re currently tracking on its way to the public markets. The other is GoHealth, which is expected to go public around the same time. Expect next week to be chock-full of IPO news. Heading into earnings season no less!
As IPO season continues, another venture-backed tech company is moving closer toward going public. This week nCino filed an updated S-1 filing, providing an initial price range for its equity of $22 to $24 per share.
Indeed, nCino, a fintech startup that provides operating software to banks, intends to sell 7.625 million shares in its debut, worth $167.75 million to $183 million at those prices. Including shares offered to its underwriters, its haul grows to between $192.9 million and $210.5 million.
Discounting the extra shares, nCino is worth between $1.96 billion to $2.14 billion at its current price range.
The startup’s software is what nCino calls a “bank operating system,” providing banking software to help financial entities with lending, customer resource management, account opening and more. It’s a rich space for innovation, given the banking industry’s complexity and wealth. Smaller startups are also working along related lines.
Normally at this point in an IPO process we compare the debuting company’s valuation range with its final private valuation. However, it’s hard to find out what nCino was worth. PitchBook and Crunchbase are bare regarding its last private round, as are other data sources we checked.
Notably, nCino has no preferred stock, so spelunking through different series of preferred equity sourced from S-1 data wasn’t possible. However, the company was healthy — and therefore, valuable — enough to raise more than $130 million across two rounds in 2018 and 2019, including an $80 million round from last October led by Chip Mahan and T. Rowe Price.
Regardless of where nCino priced toward the end of its life as a private company, its IPO is a likely win for both Salesforce and Insight Partners. The corporate venture arm of Salesforce and the well-known venture group own 13.2% and 46.6%, respectively, of nCino’s equity before IPO shares are counted; expected ownership for the two groups falls to 12.1% and 42.6%, respectively, when including anticipated IPO equity.
According to Crunchbase data, Insight Partners led nCino’s Series B and C in 2014 and 2015, while Salesforce Ventures led its $51.5 million 2018 round; Salesforce also took part in several of the company’s early rounds, helping to explain its double-digit stake in the firm.
So what?
Modern software companies, often called SaaS firms, set new valuation records this week on the public markets following earlier highs set in Q2. Their performance hints that nCino could find warm welcome from public investors.
Does that fact fit with the valuation that the above-detailed pricing indicates that nCino may achieve? Annualizing the company’s Q1 (the April 30, 2020 period) revenue results, nCino’s $178.9 million run rate would give it a revenue multiple of 11x to 12x at its expected IPO prices, a somewhat modest result by current standards.
Indeed, as nCino grew about 50% from Q1 2019 to Q1 2020, it feels light. The firm’s GAAP losses are slim compared to revenue as well for a SaaS business, though the company’s operating cash burn did grow from $4.6 million in its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019 to $9 million in its next fiscal year. Its numbers are mostly good, with some less-than-perfect results. Still, given its growth rate, an 11x-12x revenue multiple feels modest; that figure rises, of course, if we use a trailing revenue figure instead of our annualized number.
It would not be a shock, then, if nCino targets a higher price interval for its shares before it formally prices. The firm is expected to price next Tuesday and trade the next day, the same time frame as GoHealth. More when we have it.
A new product developed by Harvard professor of the Pracice of Biomedical Engineering David A. Edwards is set to launch this fall, and claims to be able to provide a nearly 100 percent reduction in the particles present in exhaled air – thus reducing the potential transmission of SARS-CoV-2 both into, and out of, the lungs while breathing. That could mean a significantly reduced risk of contracting COVID-19, particularly for frontline healthcare workers when used in combination with other PPE like face masks.
The product, called FEND, and produced by Edwards’ tech startup Sensory Cloud, is set to be available from September. It’s a saline mixture (essentially a “salty mist”) that contains no drugs, and is instead directed from naturally-occurring salts that are most often found in sea water. The mist, when delivered via deep nasal inhalation in misted form, has been shown in peer-reviewed research published on Tuesday by Sensory Cloud in medical journal QRB Discovery to clean upper human airways of particles that are less than a micron in size that aren’t typically filtered out by most conventional mask designs.
The study conducted by the company is based on a small-scale sample population of 10 volunteers, including five who are above 65, and five who are below that age, so it’s worth taking that into account when considering the results. Still, cross the sample group, the researchers found that it reduced transmitted particles per liter of air by around 99 percent – with most of those particles blocked being ones that would’ve been too small to be filtered by conventional masks.
Sensory Cloud contends that FEND could provide “anyone at risk of SARS-CoV-2” with additional protection – in terms of scrubbing the airways of both inhaled particles for those who don’t yet have the virus, and also for preventing the expulsion of viral particles for those that do. Accordingly, while the company plans to launch it to get general public through its online sales platform, it is also “committing to facilitating access” of FEND once it becomes available to “needy at-risk populations” including frontline workers around the world. Sensory Cloud is also debuting a number of clinical trials this summer, the results of which should go a long way in terms of supporting their early small-scale study results, if positive.
The startup plans to price Fend, including the mister delivery device, at $49 for a two-pack – with individual refill bottles priced at $6 each afterwards, with each refill providing around 250 total uses (each use provides the cleaning benefits described above for roughly 6 hours based on the company’s research).
