Analysis of upcoming IPO’s in Silicon Valley: Snowflake, Asana, Unity, SumoLogic, and JFrog

In the past few weeks we’ve seen a flood of high growth tech companies filing to go public.

I read through each of these companies’ S-1 filings and pulled out some of the more interesting stats to highlight. To conclude, I also share a few of my broader observations on what this means for the markets, startups, and investors.

Photo by Chris McCann

Snowflake S-1

• Company Description: Snowflake is a full stack cloud data platform.
• Founded: 2012
• Customers: 3,117
• Customer Notes:
  - Snowflake has 56 customers paying $1M+ ARR
  - Capital One accounted for 11% of Snowflake’s revenue.
• Featured Customers: Nielsen, AXA, Capital One, Experian, Stava, Sony, Logitech, Blackboard, Instacart, Adobe, Dropbox, and Akamai.
• Revenue: $264M
• Revenue Growth (YoY): 132%
• Gross Margin: 62%
• International: 88% US Revenue, 12% International
• Largest VC holders: Sutter Hill Ventures (20%) Redpoint Ventures (9%) Sequoia Capital (8%)

Deeper dive into Snowflake’s S-1 Filing: https://blog.publiccomps.com/snowflake-s1-ipo-teardown/

Asana S-1

• Company Description: Asana helps teams organize, track, and manage their work.
• Founded: 2008
• Customers: 1.2M paying users, 75K paying companies.
• Customer Notes:
  - 4.8% free to paid conversion rate
  - 9% of revenue from top 100 customers
• Featured Customers: Autodesk, Viessmann, SiteMinder, and G2.
• Revenue: $142M
• Revenue Growth (YoY): 86%
• Gross Margin: 86%
• International: 60% US Revenue, 40% International
• Largest VC holders: Benchmark (10%), Founders Fund (6.5%)

Deeper dive into Asana’s S-1 Filing: https://tomtunguz.com/asana-s-1/

Unity S-1

• Company Description: Unity is a 3D development platform for games, animation, and enterprise.
• Founded: 2004
• Customers: 1.5M active creators
• Customer Notes:
  - 62% of their revenue comes from a revenue sharing model (operate solutions)
  - 716 customers contributes more than $100K ARR
  - Customers spend on average 4.9 hours per day using Unity
• Featured Customers: Electronic Arts, Tencent, Ubisoft, Samsung, Skanska, and Volvo.
• Revenue: $700M
• Revenue Growth (YoY): 42%
• Gross Margin: 79%
• International: 30% US Revenue, 70% International
• Largest VC holders: Sequoia Capital (24%) Silver Lake (18%)

Deeper dive into Unity’s S-1 Filing: https://macro-ops.com/unity-software-breaking-down-s-1-filing/

SumoLogic S-1

• Company Description: SumoLogic is a machine data analytics platform for security, operation, and BI.
• Founded: 2010
• Customers: 2,131 customers
• Customer Notes:
  - 329 customers contributing greater than $100K ARR
  - 27 customers contributing greater than $1M ARR
• Featured Customers: 23andMe, Alaska Airlines, LendingTree, MLB, Netflix, PagerDuty, Salesforce, and Twilio.
• Revenue: $155M
• Revenue Growth (YoY): 49%
• Gross Margin: 69%
• International: 84% US Revenue, 16% International
• Largest VC holders: Greylock (22%), Sapphire Ventures (7%), Accel (6%), DFJ (5%)

Deeper dive into SumoLogic’s S-1 Filing: https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/sumo-logic-benchmarking-the-s1-data

JFrog S-1

• Company Description: JFrog is an end to end developer operations (DevOps) platform.
• Founded: 2009
• Customers: 5,800
• Customer Notes:
  - JFrog has 286 customers contributing over $100K+ ARR.
  - 10 largest customers represented 8% of total revenue.
  - 91% of their revenue is SaaS subscription revenue.
• Featured Customers: AMEX, Bank of America, Visa, Morgan Stanley, Blizzard, Washington Post, Box, Google, Microsoft, Twilio, T-Mobile, Target, HP, Qualcomm, Splunk, Atlassian
• Revenue: $138M (2020 projected)
• Revenue Growth (YoY): 50%
• Gross Margin: 81%
• International: 36% International Revenue, 64% US Revenue
• Largest VC holders: Gemini Israel Ventures (15%), Scale Ventures (10%), Sapphire Ventures (10%), Insight Partners (9%), Qumra Capital (5%)

Deeper dive into JFrog’s S-1 Filing: https://medium.com/memory-leak/jfrogs-s-1-analysis-leaping-forward-bc07bcfcae9

Observations

Here are a few broader observations to share:

Startups are a long term endeavor — On average it took ~11 years for these companies to go public.

Expect more market uncertainty — While it’s awesome all of these solid technology companies are going public, this rush of filings is most likely pointing towards more market volatility, especially as we get closer to November.

Concentrate and follow through — While spray and pray investing (small checks into lots of companies) is all the rage in Silicon Valley right now, the real winners are the firms who were able to stick it out and maintain 20%+ ownership through IPO. These phenomenal firms include — Sequoia, Greylock, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

Disclosure: I previously worked at Greylock Partners

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