Billion Dollar Unicorns: MuleSoft Delivers Successful IPO

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Photo Credit: ralphbijker/Flickr.com

After years of mulling over the idea of going public, San Francisco-based Billion Dollar Unicorn player MuleSoft finally listed this month. It became the first enterprise software company to list this year and initial market reports show that the stock is holding up well.

MuleSoft’s Financials

MuleSoft was founded by Ross Mason and Dave Rosenburg as a platform to simplify and accelerate the way business processes connect. The company was set up on the principles of being able to deliver an event-driven architecture that could be used to build high-scale web services. Its Anypoint platform is helps organizations transform their business by delivering mobile customer experiences and turning data into digital assets to drive innovation and change.

It began operations as an open source platform and then transformed to a license-fee based model. Today, it has more than 1,000 customers located in over 60 countries across industries. Its customers include Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Salesforce.com, Unilever, and Bank of America, to name a few. It has grown its revenues from $57.6 million in 2014 to $110.3 million in 2015 to $187.7 million in 2016. Despite the increasing revenues, MuleSoft is not yet profitable. It reported losses of $47.8 million in 2014 which grew to $65.4 million in 2015 before reducing to $49.6 million for 2016. Analysts are hoping that the trend of reducing losses will continue in the future.

MuleSoft earns revenues through subscription and support services and other professional services that include implementation of platform and training services for new customers. Subscription revenues have grown 73% to $152.8 million in 2016. Professional services revenues grew 57% to $34.9 million.

MuleSoft was bootstrapped initially before it began raising venture funds. Prior to listing, it had raised $259 million in funding from investors including Morgenthaler Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, Bay Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Salesforce Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Cisco, and Salesforce.com. Its last financing round was held in May 2015 when it raised $128 million led by Salesforce Ventures at a valuation of $1.5 billion. An earlier round held in May 2014 had valued MuleSoft at $800 million.

MuleSoft’s Enhanced Offerings

MuleSoft is not the only application integration platform out there. Its closest competitor was Apigee, which had listed in 2015 and was picked up by Google last year at a valuation of $625 million. Apigee was smaller than MuleSoft and had earned $92 million in revenues for 2016 with a net loss of $41.5 million.

Meanwhile, MuleSoft is continuing to expand its market share through product enhancement. Last year, it became a pioneer in the industry by launching the first hybrid integration platform for application networks. The upgraded Anypoint Platform offers re-architected API development lifecycle for building pluggable nodes for application networks, regardless of application or data type. Its new API designer functionality embedded in Anypoint Studio allows multiple stakeholders to collaborate on API designs within their native workspaces. The application now allows API developers to create and reuse design libraries across network components and leverage the power of API kit to automatically generate Mule flows. It has also expanded its connector portfolio to include connectors for Box, Kafka, Redis and Zuora.

As part of the governance model, MuleSoft now delivers self-service across application networks through existing organizational controls and by applying pre-built policies universally across application network resources. It also helps with compliance by configuring alerts across APIs, applications, and underlying servers to provide proactive visibility into application network issues before they impact the business and through audit logging.

The market is pleased with MuleSoft’s stock listing. MuleSoft listed on the NYSE last week under the ticker MULE by selling 13 million shares for $221 million at $17 each at a valuation of $2.1 billion. The IPO price was higher than the expected $14-$16 a share. The stock is currently trading at $22.68 after touching a high of $25.92 soon after listing.

 

Sramana Mitra is the founder of One Million by One Million (1M/1M), a global virtual incubator that aims to help one million entrepreneurs ...

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