That Qualtrics IPO many have been expecting is on hold for now. The online market research platform has just raised its third round for $180 million at a whopping $2.5 billion valuation.
The Provo, Utah-based company came from much humbler beginnings, bootstrapping the operation for a decade before finally taking financing from Sequoia and Accel in 2012. It has blown up since then, hitting unicorn valuation status two years later, with $150 million in annual revenue. The company now tells me it’s hitting somewhere north of $250 million in revenue this year.
On the outside, the company looks pretty healthy. Founder Ryan Smith tells me Qualtrics is profitable — something not many tech companies, even some that have gone public recently, can say. Many, including myself, have speculated, based on those financials and a few other indicators, the company may have been making plans to go public in 2017.
While that could still be in the cards, it’s also not unheard of for a company to raise one final round before diving into the public market. Mulesoft picked up another $128 million ten months prior to filing in March, for example.
And Smith has said he plans on going public. It looks like he’s feverishly working towards that goal. Five months ago the startup hired Microsoft veteran Zig Serafin as its COO and just added Atlassian’s CFO Murray Demo, who helped guide that company through its initial $4.4 billion public offering, to the board. Companies often pull in key leadership just before going public and Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith told TechCrunch in a recent interview he was “getting his house in order” in preparation for an IPO event.
An IPO isn’t an exit. It should be the beginning and we wouldn’t be going out if we didn’t think that more wealth could be created post-IPO.
— Ryan Smith, Qualtrics
Couple that with a market that has been referred to as a “perfect storm” for filing and it might seem a head-scratcher why Qualtrics would take another round, diluting its equity instead of going public.
But an IPO might have been on the table before…