CrowdStrike sets terms for $378M Nasdaq IPO

CrowdStrike, in preparation for its Nasdaq initial public offering, has inked plans to sell 18 million shares at between $19 and $23 apiece. At a midpoint price, CrowdStrike will raise $378 million at a valuation north of $4 billion.

The company, which develops cloud-native endpoint protection software to prevent cyber breaches, has raised $480 million in venture capital funding to date from Warburg Pincus, which owns a 30.2% pre-IPO stake, Accel (20.2%) and CapitalG (11.1%), according to its IPO prospectus. The business was valued at $3.3 billion with a $200 million January 2018 Series E funding.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CrowdStrike outlined its IPO plans two weeks ago. The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol “CRWD.”

The cybersecurity unicorn follows several other highly valued venture-backed startups to the public markets, including Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, PagerDuty and Zoom. CrowdStrike’s offering will represent only the second cybersecurity IPO in 2019, however. It follows Israel’s Tufin Software Technologies, which went public earlier this year. Last year, for its part, saw the IPOs of Zscaler, Carbon Black and Tenable.

Founded in 2011 by former McAfee executives George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike is up against steep competition in the cyber protection space. It’s battling the likes of McAfee, Cylance, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, Carbon Black and more.

The business’ revenues, fortunately, are growing at an impressive rate, increasing from $53 million in 2017 and $119 million in 2018 to $250 million in the year ending January 31, 2019. In the quarter ending April 30, 2019, its revenues shot up from $47.3 million in 2018 Q1 to between $93.6 million to $95.7 million.

CrowdStrike is also backed by IVP, March Capital Partners, General Atlantic and others.

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