Asana, Snowflake lead tech company rush to public markets in landmark day

A slew of Bay Area software companies with multibillion-dollar valuations filed for public listings on Monday, adding to a recent rush in a sign that markets are welcoming aspiring public companies with open arms. It also marked one of the IPO market's single busiest days to witness so many filings at once.
 

• Asana, the workplace productivity startup led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, filed for a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO. Asana had reportedly been trading on the secondary market at around a $5 billion valuation. In late 2018, it was worth $1.5 billion, according to PitchBook data. The San Francisco-based company's filing showed its losses more than doubled to $35.8 million for the three months ended April 30 vs. a loss of $15 million in the year-earlier period. But its revenue for the same period also grew 70% to $47.7 million from $28 million. Asana also reported having over 75,000 paying customers at the end of January.
  • Asana's top shareholders include Benchmark (with a 10.3% stake), Generation Investment Management (7.2%) and Founders Fund (6.4%)


• After a funding round in February that valued it at over $12.4 billion, cloud data company Snowflake opted for the traditional IPO route. In its filing, it revealed that losses nearly doubled to $348.5 million for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, from $178 million for the same period the year before. Snowflake's revenue for those periods was $264.7 million and $96.7 million respectively, representing 174% growth. At the end of July, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company had a total of 3,117 customers.
  • Top Snowflake shareholders are Sutter Hill Ventures (20.3%), Altimeter Capital Management (14.8%) and Iconiq Capital (13.8%)


• Unity Software, a platform for video game developers led by former Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello, filed to go public on the NYSE. The San Francisco-based company's filing states that more than half of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store were made on its platform. Unity said it lost $54.1 million on revenue of $351.3 million for the first half of 2020, after it lost $67.1 million on $252.8 million of revenue for the same period last year.
  • Unity's top institutional shareholders are Sequoia (24.1%) and Silver Lake (18.2%)


• And rounding up the day's prominent IPO tech filings is JFrog, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based platform for software developers.  In the first half of this year, the company lost $426,000 on $69.3 million of sales. That compares to a loss of $2.1 million on $46.1 million in revenue last year. As a result of the pandemic, the company said it experienced slowed growth and expects a decline in new customers and lower demand from existing ones.
  • The company's top shareholders are Gemini Israel Ventures (15.8%), Scale Venture Partners (10.8%) and Sapphire Ventures (9.9%)


• The IPO market momentum may continue on Tuesday as Palantir could file its prospectus, according to Business Insider.

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