Livongo’s IPO: How M12 came to invest and add value

Today marks a terrific milestone in the journey of Livongo Health. Today, the company has a great opportunity to shine an even brighter light on its work to positively impact the lives of their members managing chronic illness. On behalf of M12, I’d like to extend a huge congratulations to Glen Tullman, Zane Burke, Jennifer Schneider, and Lee Shapiro and the entire Livongo team on going public on Nasdaq. Only a small fraction of startups ever get to an IPO, and M12 is humbled to have played a small part as an investor, customer and partner.

Livongo is M12’s first IPO in the fund’s three-year history. The investment in Livongo started with one simple question to one of our VC co-investors: “What else should we be looking at in your portfolio?” I posed that question in February 2017 to Hemant Taneja, Managing Director, General Catalyst, at a lunch event designed to allow our two larger teams to get to know each other (VC dating, if you will). Hemant mentioned a rock star company in his portfolio that was raising a Series D round — Livongo Health. But he was hesitant to make the introduction as the company needed an answer ASAP as they were finalizing investment allocations. “Can M12 move fast enough?” was his concern.

I pressed, and we met Glen Tullman, then CEO and Founder of Livongo, the very next day. We were immediately impressed by Glen’s professional accomplishments: he had previously run two public companies. But we were truly enamored with Glen because of his first-hand experience managing his family’s challenges with both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. It didn’t hurt that Livongo was also a business doubling each year at scale and with best-in-class metrics. And of course, General Catalyst’s doubling down and leading an oversubscribed round was a strong signal.

We dedicated the next week diving into diligence and understanding how M12 could add value to Livongo. The deal team pulled a couple of all-nighters to complete diligence and write the investment memo. Eventually, our partnership approved of the investment in record time and we became excited investors in Livongo.

But the real work was just beginning. The immediate value-add from M12 was to get Microsoft (with our over 140,000 employees) to become a Livongo customer. My partner and Global Head of M12, Nagraj Kashyap, was the right person to help drive that forward at the highest levels of Microsoft, so he took the Board Observer seat. It took persistent advocacy, but Nagraj delivered and Microsoft now offers Livongo as an employee health benefit.

We know that an IPO is not the end game, but the beginning of yet another phase of the journey. Livongo is revolutionizing healthcare through data science and technology and we can’t wait to see where they go as a public company.

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