Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm wants to be made public

Security software provider Crowdstrike has asked to go public on Tuesday, joining a growing group of high-value technology companies hitting public markets.

During the fiscal year ended January 31, Crowdstrike recorded a net loss of $ 140 million, while its sales more than doubled to $ 249.8 million, according to the company's prospectus. The majority of the company's sales come from subscriptions sold to over 2,500 companies.

Crowdstrike cloud technology is designed to detect vulnerabilities before they occur when tracking activity on desktops, server computers, and other devices. The analysis of violations occurs in the cloud, which allows the company to have improved data to analyze the growing number of threats that all businesses face. Customers include Credit Suisse, Australian mobile phone company Telstra, Tribune Media and Amazon Web Services.

"Across the globe, organizations are becoming more distributed as they embrace the cloud, increase workforce mobility, and increase their number of connected devices," says O'Connor. the company in its prospectus.

Like most emerging companies that sell to the company, Crowdstrike spends a lot on its sales force. Sales and marketing costs jumped 66% last year to $ 172.7 million. The company stated that most of these costs were related to employee-related expenses, but that it was also spending for Fal Con's customer conference and other marketing events.

Of the six notable technology IPOs carried out so far this year, two are largely on the market for enterprise software – PagerDuty and Zoom. Both have skyrocketed since their debut, while carpool companies, Uber and Lyft, have stumbled. Slack, the mobile chat service used by businesses, will likely be the next business to become public.

Crowdstrike was valued at $ 3 billion on his last private tour last June. It operates in a highly competitive market with competitors such as McAfee and Symantec antivirus companies and other security software vendors such as Cylance, Carbon Black, Palo Alto Networks, and FireEye.

An unidentified chain partner accounted for 15% of Crowdstrike's revenues during the fiscal year ended January 31st.

"We recently announced a technology and business partnership with Dell Inc. that will allow Dell's corporate customers to seamlessly add the Falcon platform to their Dell hardware purchase," said Crowdstrike. "Dell and SecureWorks Corp. have also agreed to market our Falcon platform to the market, as a security offering of their preferred touch points through their global business organizations."

Warburg Pincus is the largest shareholder of Crowdstrike, with a 30% stake, followed by Accel at 20% and Alphabet CapitalG's investment arm at 11%. Google is also a Crowdstrike customer.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company was founded in 2011 and launched its first endpoint security product two years later.

The security will be traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol "CRWD". The filing indicates that Crowdstrike is seeking to raise up to $ 100 million during the initial public offering, although this is only a placeholder. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America of Bank of America lead the transaction.

– Ari Levy from CNBC contributed to this report.

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