So it’s been a long IPO drought since HashiCorp was the last IPO of the Boom Times in December 2021. Since then, we’ve had just one — Klaviyo.
But now a second SaaS security leader has filed to IPO, Rubrik. They’re still transitioning from onprem / appliciance model to cloud, which makes some of the metrics a touch confusing.
But they are ar $780,000,000+ in ARR, with an 86 NPS and strong revenue growth at 29% overall and 49% in subscriptions (yes, it’s confusing).
Is this the new bar to IPO in SaaS? $500m+ ARR, with ~50% growth?
If so, it’s a mighty high bar.
5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. NRR Down a Bit, But Still Very Impressive at 133%
I borrowed the NRR chart below from Meritch.
#2. New Customers Still Growing 22% at Scale. And $100k+ Customers Growing 45%.
For me, Net New Customer Count has become the metric I obsess the most about at scale. If that slows too much, the future starts to look cloudy. But even as it approaches $1B in ARR, Rubrik is still growing New New Customers more than 20% a year. Rubrik has gone aggressively more upmarket — from just 23 $100k customers in 2019 to 1,742 in 2024.
#3. Not That Efficient — Yet
Rubrik is bucking the trend of public SaaS leaders by not being profitable, free-cash flow positive, or really all that efficient … yet. Still, it’s losing far less than in the Go Go Times of 2021. But it’s decided to keep investing heavily in growth. For now. It still burned -$93m in cash through January 31, 2024. And on a GAAP basis, losses are still growing.
#4. 68% of Revenue in U.S., 32% International
Not a surprise, just our classic 5 Interesting Learnings as a reminder to go global as early as is practical!
#5. Up to 8,000,000 More Shares to Founder CEO if Stock Price Hits Targets
This is becoming more and more common, everyone from Squarespace to Tesla has done more and more of stock price-based grants to incent founder CEOs especially to grow the price higher than the IPO or current public price. It did seem to work at Tesla, less so perhaps at Squarespace.
8m shares is a big grant, albeit it’s really 10 individual grants with big milestones to hit to get all of them. Founder CEO Bipul Sinha has 12.3m shares currently, 7.6% of the company pre-IPO. So another 8m would both move the needle and lead to substantial dilution. But getting them all really requires big stock price growth, all the way up to 759% stock price aprpeciation.
It will be interesting to see how these start-up like big stock incentives for big performance programs really work for founder CEOs post-IPO. My guess is they work well, but TBD.
Let’s great ready for just the second SaaS IPO since 2021!
Go Rubrik!
