On Monday, August 24, 2020 ,six technology startups filed for initial public offer, IPO. Asana, Snowflake, Unity, Palantir, JFrog, and Sumo Logic, all submitted their S-1s, marking one of the busiest days in history for United States’s Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC filings. With the stock market recovered from its COVID-induced drop in April, tech companies are looking to cash in.
Asana, a work management platform that competes with Jira, reported 86 per cent ,Year on Year revenue growth with over 1.2 million paying users. Founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz in 2008, Asana made $143M in revenue in the past fiscal year.
Unity, a 3D video game development platform founded in 2004, made $350M in revenue in the first half of 2020. Over 50 per cent of mobile, PC, and console games use Unity in some form, including Mario Kart: Tour and Pokemon GO.
Snowflake Computing, a data warehousing startup founded in 2012, has been growing like gangbusters, tripling its revenue to $242M in the first half of 2020.
Palantir, a startup founded by Peter Thiel, that sells data products to governments, also filed to go public. The company booked $742M in revenue across only 125 customers, with more than $200M of that revenue coming from its top three customers. In spite of that strong showing, the company booked a $580M loss last year.
If there’s a lesson to be taken from this wave of IPOs, it’s this: be patient. The aforementioned startups were founded in 2008, 2004, 2012, and 2003.
Funding and acquisitions
Lambda School has raised $74 million to support the company’s mission to unlock student potential. Lambda School runs virtual computer science programs for $30,000. Payments for the course are based on a sliding scale that only kicks in after participants land a job that earns at least $50,000. Lambda School will use the round of financing to meet surging demand for its programs.
Spaces, a VR startup that spun out of DreamWorks Animation, has been acquired by Apple. Spaces most recently built a VR add-on to Zoom, which allows users to participate in meetings with an animated avatar. Apple has been developing its own AR/VR headset and has acquired a number of startups in the space.
MURAL, a visual collaboration startup that provides a whiteboard-like digital environment, announced it has raised a $118 million Series B. The startup has seen explosive growth since the onset of COVID-19, tripling revenue and adding over 1M monthly active users.
Socure, a cloud-based identity verification startup, closed a $35 million round. Socure’s digital verification suite leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to authenticate people from “thousands” of data points. The startup then tabulates “trust scores” in less than a second and explains its conclusions in detail.
source:Angelist
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