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DoubleDown is going public: Why isn’t its IPO worth more?
Agora isn’t the only company headquartered outside the United States aiming to go public domestically this quarter. After catching up on Agora’s F-1 filing, the China-and-U.S.-based, API-powered tech company that went public last week, today we’re parsing DoubleDown Interactive’s IPO document.
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The mobile gaming company is targeting the NASDAQ and wants to trade under the ticker symbol “DDI.”
As with Agora, DoubleDown filed an F-1, instead of an S-1. That’s because it’s based in South Korea, but it’s slightly more complicated than that. DoubleDown was founded in Seattle, according to Crunchbase, before selling itself to DoubleU Games, which is based in South Korea. So, yes, the company is filing an F-1 and will remain majority-held by its South Korean parent company post-IPO, but this offering is more a local affair than it might at first seem.
Even more, with a $17 to $19 per-share IPO price range, the company could be worth up to nearly $1 billion when it debuts. Does that pricing make sense? We want to find out.
So let’s quickly explore the company this morning. We’ll see what this mobile, social gaming company looks like under the hood in an effort to understand why it is being sent to the public markets right now. Let’s go!
Fundamentals
Any gaming company has to have its fun-damentals in place so that it can have solid financial results, right? Right?
Anyway, DoubleDown is a nicely profitable company. In 2019 its revenue only grew a hair to $273.6 million from $266.9 million the year before (a mere 2.5% gain), but the company’s net income rose from $25.1 million to $36.3 million, and its adjusted EBITDA rose from $85.1 million to $101.7 million over the same period.
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Agora’s above-range pricing underscores a welcoming IPO market
In a move that highlights how open the American IPO window may be at the moment, China-based Agora priced its public offering at $20 per share last night, ahead of its $16 to $18 proposed price range. (Update: As noted here, the company has a second HQ in California.)
At $20 per share, the 17.5 million shares sold in its debut raised $350 million, a huge haul for a company that reported around 10% of that figure in Q1 2020 revenue. Provided that your humble servant is doing his Class A to ADS share conversion calculations correctly, Agora is worth about $2 billion at its IPO price.
Agora raised well over $100 million while a private company, backed by GGV Capital, Coatue and others, according to Crunchbase data.
The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.
Agora is an API-powered company that allows customers to embed real-time video and voice abilities in their applications; appropriately, the company’s ticker symbol in America will be “API.”
With an annual run rate of $142.2 million, a $2 billion valuation gives Agora a run-rate multiple of around 14x. That’s rich, but not stratospheric. Perhaps Agora wasn’t able to command a higher multiple due to its sub-70% margins (68.8% in Q1)?
Agora’s financials make its IPO pricing a neat puzzle, so let’s pull apart the good and the bad to better understand why the market was willing to pay more than the company anticipated.
After that short exercise, we’ll make note of the current IPO climate, inclusive of what we learn from Agora. (Spoiler for unicorns out there: Things look good.)
The good, the bad, the odd
We can’t calculate Agora’s enterprise value with confidence until we get updated filings. But taking into account the company’s pre-IPO cash and liabilities, its implied enterprise value/run rate is something around 13x. (That figure will dip if the company’s shares don’t rise after its debut, as its cash position rises from its share sale; more on enterprise values here.)
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As the IPO market warms, Accolade targets billion-dollar debut
As the IPO market heats up, one offering slipped beneath our radar. This morning, then, we’ll catch up on Accolade’s initial public offering and what its proposed pricing may tell us about the state of the IPO market.
The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.
Catching everyone back up, Accolade sells its service to employers who in turn offer it to their employees; the company’s tech provides a portal for individuals to “better understand, navigate and utilize the health care system and their workplace benefits,” Accolade states in its S-1 filings.
The firm goes on to point out that the U.S. health care system is complex, which puts “significant strain on consumers.” Correct. Its solution? To help “consumers make better, data-driven health care and benefits-related decisions” through its service by selling a “platform to support and influence consumer decision-making that is built on a foundation of mission-driven people and purpose-built technology.”
Yeah.
Regardless of that verbiage, Accolade’s business has proven sufficiently attractive to allow the firm to file to go public in late February, around when Procore filed. Both companies delayed their offerings, but Procore raised more private capital, a $150 million round that values it at around $5 billion. Accolade, to our knowledge, did not raise more funds. So, its IPO is back on and today we have its pricing interval.
Let’s unpack its pricing range, write some notes on its recent financial results and try to figure out how ambitious Accolade is being in terms of its expected valuation as it counts down to trading publicly.
Accolade’s S-1/A
According to Accolade’s June 24th S-1/A, the company expects a $19 to $21 per-share IPO price range. The company intends to sell 8.75 million shares in its debut, not counting a 1,312,500 share greenshoe option offered to its underwriters. Discounting the extra shares, Accolade would raise between $166.3 million to $183.8 million in its debut; inclusive of greenshoe shares, the total fundraise grows to a range of $191.2 million to $211.3 million.
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The IPO window is open (again)
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
ZoomInfo went public yesterday. After pricing its IPO $1 ahead of its proposed range at $21 per share, the company closed its first day’s trading worth $34.00, up 61.9%, according to Yahoo Finance. Then the company gained another 5.2% in after-hours trading.
Whether you feel that this SaaS player was worth the revenue multiple its original, $8 billion valuation dictated — let alone that same multiple times 1.6x — the message from the offering was clear: the IPO window is open.
This is not news to a few companies looking to take advantage of today’s strong equity prices.
Used-car marketplace Vroom is looking to get its shares public before its Q2 numbers come out, despite a history of slim gross profit generation. The company hopes to go public for as much as $1.9 billion, a modest uptick from its final private valuations.
We’ll get another dose of data when Vroom does price — how much investors are willing to pay for slim-margin revenue will tell us a bit more than what we learned from ZoomInfo, which has far superior gross margins. Investors have already signaled that they are content to value high-margin software-ish revenues richly. Vroom is more of a question, but if it does price strongly we’ll know public investors are looking for any piece of growth they can find.
This brings us to the latest news: Amwell has confidentially filed to go public. Formerly known as American Well, CNBC reports that the venture-backed telehealth company has dramatically expanded its customer base:
Telemedicine has seen an uptick in recent months, as people in need of health services turned to phone calls and video chats so they could avoid exposure to COVID-19. The company told CNBC last month that it’s seen a 1,000% increase in visits due to coronavirus, and closer to 3,000% to 4,000% in some places.
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DigitalOcean raises $50M more from Access Industries and a16z
Earlier today, DigitalOcean announced that it raised $50 million more from prior investors Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz. The capital comes after the SMB and developer-focused cloud infrastructure company raised nine-figures worth of debt back in February.
DigitalOcean is a large private company that generated revenue at a run rate of around $250 million towards the end of 2019. The company announced today that it has reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. (We recently added the company to our ARR club here.) That’s growth of around 20% in less than half a year, though we don’t know precisely when the company reached the $250 million mark, making it hard to calculate its true growth pace.
Critically, DigitalOcean is walking toward profitability while expanding.
DigitalOcean’s CEO Yancey Spruill told TechCrunch earlier this year that his firm would reach free cash flow positivity in the next few years, a timeline that appears to have moved up (more on that shortly). Provided that the cloud company can keep its growth pace up over the same time period, it could be well positioned for an IPO.
The new $50 million values the company at $1.15 billion, meaning it was worth $1.1 billion pre-money. DigitalOcean is not being valued like a SaaS startup today in revenue multiple terms, then, though its new valuation is still nearly double its old Series B valuation (a company spokesperson confirmed the numbers on that page).
New capital
TechCrunch wanted to know why the company raised equity capital so quickly after it had added debt to its books. The capital was surely welcome given the world’s economic condition, but the timing was worth digging into.
DigitalOcean was not “seeking additional funding,” according to Spruill, but after “reviewing our business performance and outlook with our investors at Access and a16z, they were interested in investing for our next phase of growth.” The company accepted, Spruill said.
Presumably, Digital Ocean’s quick revenue growth from a $250 million run rate to $300 million ARR played a part in the investment decision. For DigitalOcean, receiving a new, higher valuation and a monetary top-off from well-known investors may even provide a brand boost (see this article, especially in light of recent coverage the firm has attracted).
Regarding its plans for the new capital, Spruill told TechCrunch that DigitalOcean can now “better support the increase in demand we’ve seen from entrepreneurs and SMBs around the world as more businesses are transitioning to the cloud, particularly as a result of COVID.” Mark DigitalOcean down as one of the world’s companies that is seeing an uptick from the pandemic; most aren’t, but the firms that are appear to be using the moment to put more capital onto their balance sheets.
TechCrunch also wanted to know if the new capital opened new ground for the firm, or if its priorities for the new capital were similar to its preceding goals. The CEO told TechCrunch that his firm’s focus is the same, namely expanding its business.
“We remain committed to reaching $1 billion in revenue, achieving free cash flow profitability in the second half of this year and, ultimately, position DigitalOcean to be a public company,” Spruill said in an email.
That’s clear enough.
By that measure we can expect to see a DigitalOcean S-1 in the first half of 2021, if markets recover. So a16z and Access Industries (longtime investors in the company) could see a quick return for their most recent checks if current plans hold up.
The company’s release made note of “accelerating growth,” which TechCrunch wanted to know more about. How quickly is the company growing? Spruill didn’t share numbers to confirm or deny our rough math based on his firm’s public revenue milestones, but did tell TechCrunch that the company is “actively working on a number of initiatives to accelerate our revenue growth rate,” adding that these are internally dubbed “Grow Faster” initiatives.
Finally, TechCrunch was curious about the impact that COVID-19 is having on DigitalOcean. The company told us that it has “seen a modest increase in churn as a result of COVID-19,” but nothing too bad, saying that the change was “not significant” when “compared with recent trends immediately prior to the pandemic.”
On the positive side of the ledger, DigitalOcean said that its “sign up of new customers has been accelerating” and that it is seeing “increased business from some existing customers.” Adding that up for the SaaS kids: A little bit more churn, good new logo addition, and some upsell tailwinds. Overall that adds up to growth.
More when we have it, but now we’re at least set up to understand what the company does next.
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Airbnb is buying trust during the COVID-19 travel slowdown
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Airbnb’s recent moves in the wake of a global travel slowdown are interesting and worth understanding in chronological order. What it details is a company spending heavily today to keep up its future health. Demand will return to the world travel market in time — how much, no one knows — and Airbnb wants to be a well-liked participant in the return to form.
Building off our last look at the company, we should understand how Airbnb intends to not only survive, but come out the other side of the pandemic with enough user trust to get back to work.
An IPO promise
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Have hundreds of unicorns missed their exit window as Q1 IPOs grind to a halt?
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
As investors struggle to price the stock market as economic and political news continues to break, the private market is entering a rough period. It seems increasingly likely that the period of disruption due to COVID-19 will persist for months, if not quarters. That means missed Q1 and Q2 revenue growth, bookings, and the like from startups domestically and around the world.
And that’s the bullish case. For some cohorts of startups, the outlook is even worse. Think about travel startups, ride-hailing upstarts, and any grouping of private companies that pursued a high-burn, high-growth model; that final category is about to run into the twin issues of the inflexibility of cost structure and the impact of slowing sales. That alone would make fundraising more difficult; toss in a deflating stock market and possible recession, and the mixture is a downright mess.
But we owe it to ourselves to survey what is going on in an attempt to answer our own questions about IPOs, exits, unicorn tallies, and who might be in trouble. Unlike when things were less bad, there will be no laughing this morning and no jokes. Just notes on what’s going wrong and what it might mean for private companies.
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Uber and Lyft plunge, erasing recent gains after promising profits
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
A few weeks ago, Uber and Lyft, kicking bags of the 2019 stock market and regularly cited as examples of venture-backed excess, were back to fighting form.
After encouraging Q3 2019 reports from both ride-hailing giants that included fresh profitability promises and timelines, Uber upped the ante by moving its profitability goal up when it reported Q4 results earlier this year. Shares of the famous company rallied. When Lyft failed to mimic the declaration in its own Q4 earnings report, it was dinged by investors. But from the time of their Q3 2019 earnings reports to recently, Uber and Lyft were coming back up for air.
Suddenly, it was perfectly reasonable to be optimistic about the two ride-hailing companies that had become more famous for their sticky losses than their growth potential; as the pair had matured from upstart to public company, their money-losing methods appeared increasingly permanent, making the Q3 2019 and Q4 2019 profit declarations investor balm.
But after the rally came the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. Since then, the two companies have lost huge amounts of ground. Their shares fell 9.8% (Uber) and 11.8% (Lyft) yesterday alone. In pre-market trading this morning, they are down even more. I wanted to get my head around what could be causing this, so let’s run through each company’s most recent profit forecasts, results, share price gains and losses, and what investors are telling the world through their recent selloff. (Hint: DoorDash’s IPO probably isn’t happening soon.)
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Unpacking Procore’s S-1 filing
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single app: Procore’s service allows other apps to plug into it, making it a platform of sorts. The company filed to go public last Friday, meaning that we have endless new numbers to delve into.
Even better for us, Procore is a SaaS company, which means we can understand its numbers.
Procore lists $100 million as its IPO placeholder raise, intends to list on the NYSE as PCOR and its debut is being underwritten by Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Barclays and Jefferies.
Why do we care about this particular IPO? A few reasons. First, Procore filed to go public after the worst week in the stock market since the 2008 crash. That’s either calculated bravery, unbridled hubris or accidental folly. We’ll see. And second, the company’s backers are well-known: Bessemer, Greater Pacific Capital, ICONIQ, Dragoneer and Tiger, according to Crunchbase.
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Quick notes on the DoorDash IPO filing
Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff, DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public. The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve.
The move to announce its private filing is more interesting and could be related to prepping demand for its shares, providing some PR-cover for backer SoftBank, which could use the assist, or, perhaps, to dampen investor excitement for rival companies, in the face of DoorDash’s implied success and maturity.
Whatever the reasons behind the timing — some of which must deal with the capital requirements of long-running cash burn — the filing is a new milestone for the on-demand and gig economies. And how well DoorDash’s filing is received, predicated in no small part on its recent financial performance, will help set sentiment for a number of other, richly backed startups.
So let’s remind ourselves of what we know about DoorDash’s financial history. This will give us a workable foundation heading into its eventual S-1, and, we presume, old-fashioned IPO. (It’s hard to imagine the cash-fired engine that is DoorDash looking toward a direct listing.) We’ll dig through its fundraising, unearth what we know about its revenue over time and turn over some data concerning its hiring efforts in recent months to better understand its IPO prep.
History
DoorDash’s fundraising history is well-known but worth recalling sequentially.
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