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Accel closes on $3B across three funds as it ramps up global investing
Accel announced Tuesday the close of three new funds totaling $3.05 billion, money that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for more mature companies. Notably, the 38-year-old Silicon Valley-based venture firm is doubling down on global investing.
The announcement underscores both the robust confidence investors continue to have for backing startups in the tech sector and the amount of money available to startups these days.
Specifically, today Accel is announcing its 15th early-stage U.S. fund at $650 million; its seventh early-stage European and Israeli fund also at $650 million and its sixth global growth stage fund at $1.75 billion. The latter fund is in addition, and designed to complement, a previously unannounced $2.3 billion global “Leaders” fund that is focused on later-stage investing that Accel closed in December.
Accel expects to invest in about 20 to 30 companies per fund on average, according to Partner Rich Wong. Its average investment in its growth fund will be in the $50 million to $75 million range, and $75 million and $100 million out of its global Leaders fund.
But the firm is also still eager and “excited” to incubate companies, Wong said.
“We’ll still write $500,000 to $1 million seed checks,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s important to us to work with companies from the very beginning and support them through their entire journey.”
Indeed, as TechCrunch recently reported, Accel has a history of backing companies that were previously bootstrapped (and often profitable) -– the latest example being Lower, a Columbus, Ohio-based fintech, which just raised a $100 million Series A.
Interestingly, Accel is often referred to some of these companies by existing portfolio companies (also in the case of Lower, whose CEO was referred to Accel by Galileo Clay Wilkes). More often than not, companies that Accel backs out of its early-stage and growth funds are bootstrapped and located outside of Silicon Valley.
The venture firm has long looked outside of Silicon Valley for opportunities, and has had offices not only in the Bay Area, but in London and Bangalore for years. Part of its investment thesis is to “invest early and locally,” according to Wong. Examples of this philosophy include investments in companies based all over the world — from Mexico to Stockholm to Tel Aviv to Munich.
Since the time of its last fund closure in 2019, the firm has seen 10 portfolio companies go public, including Slack, Austin-based Bumble, Bucharest-based UiPath, CrowdStrike, PagerDuty, Deliveroo and Squarespace, among others.
It also had 40 companies experience an M&A, including Utah-based Qualtrics’s $8 billion acquisition by SAP and Segment’s $3.2 billion acquisition by Twilio. Also, just last week, Rockwell Automation announced it was buying Michigan-based Plex Systems for $2.22 billion in cash. Accel first invested in Plex, which has developed a subscription-based smart manufacturing platform, in 2012.
Recent investments include a number of fintech companies such as LatAm’s Flink, Berlin-based Trade Republic, Unit and Robinhood rival Public. Accel has also backed as existing portfolio companies such as Webflow, a software company that helps businesses build no-code websites and events startup Hopin.
Wong says Accel is “open-minded but thematic” in its investment approach.
Accel Partner Sonali de Rycker, who is based out of London, agrees.
“For example, we’ll look at automation companies, consumer businesses and security companies, but at a global scale. Our goal is to find the best entrepreneurs regardless of where they are,” she said.
That has only been intensified by the recent rise of the smartphone and cloud, Wong said.
“Before, companies were mostly selling to the consumer in their own country,” he added. “But now the size of the market is so dramatically bigger, allowing them to become even larger, which is one of the reasons why I believe we’re seeing investment pace at this speed.”
To support this, it’s notable that Accel’s global Leaders fund is “dramatically” larger than the $500 million Leaders fund the firm closed in 2019.
Also, de Rycker points out, companies are staying private longer so the opportunity to invest in them until they sell or go public is greater.
Accel is also patient. In some cases, the firm’s investors will develop “years-long” relationships with companies they are courting.
“1Password is an example of this approach,” Wong said. “Arun [Mathew] had that relationship for at least six years before that investment was made. Finally, 1Password called and said ‘We’re ready, and we want you to do it.’ ”
And so Accel led the Canadian company’s first external round of funding in its 14-year history — a $200 million Series A — in 2019.
While the firm is open-minded, there are still some industries it has not yet embraced as much as others. For example, Wong said, “We’re not announcing a $2.2 billion crypto fund, but we have done crypto investments, and see some very interesting trends there. We’ll look at where crypto takes us.”
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In its first funding in 7 years, profitable fintech Lower raises $100M Series A led by Accel
Lower, an Ohio-based home finance platform, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel.
This round is notable for a number of reasons. First off, it’s a large Series A even by today’s standards. The financing also marks the previously bootstrapped Lower’s first external round of funding in its seven-year history. Lower is also something that is kind of rare these days in the startup world: profitable. Silicon Valley-based Accel has a history of backing profitable, bootstrapped companies, having also led large Series A rounds for the likes of 1Password, Atlassian, Qualtrics, Webflow, Tenable and Galileo (which went on to be acquired by SoFi).
In fact, Galileo founder Clay Wilkes introduced the VC firm to Dan Snyder, Lower’s founder and CEO. The two companies have a few things in common besides being profitable: they were both bootstrapped for years before taking institutional capital and both have headquarters outside of Silicon Valley.
“We were immediately intrigued because Ohio-based Lower echoes both of these themes,” said Accel partner John Locke, who led the firm’s investment in Lower and is taking a seat on the company’s board as part of the investment. “Like Galileo, Lower will be one of the most successful bootstrapped fintech companies globally. The combination of a company built in a nontraditional region across the globe and a bootstrapped company reminds us of [other] companies we have partnered with for a large Series A.”
There were other unnamed participants in the round, but Accel provided the “majority” of the investment, according to Lower.
Snyder co-founded Lower in 2014 with the goal of making the home-buying process simpler for consumers. The company launched with Homeside, its retail brand that Snyder describes as “a tech-leveraged retail mortgage bank” that works with realtors and builders, among others.
In 2018, the company launched the website for Lower, its direct-to-consumer digital lending brand with the mission of making its platform a one-stop shop where consumers can go online to save for a home, obtain or refinance a mortgage and get insurance through its marketplace. This year, it launched the Lower mobile app with a savings account.
Sitting (L to R): Co-founders Dan Snyder, Grayson Hanes
Standing (L to R): Co-founders Mike Baynes, Chris Miller
Not pictured: Robert Tyson; Image credit: Lower
Over the years, Lower has funded billions of dollars in loans and notched an impressive $300 million in revenue in 2020 after doubling revenue every year, according to Snyder.
“Our history is maybe a little atypical of fintech companies today,” he told TechCrunch. “We’ve had a view going back to the start of the company that we wanted to run it profitably. That’s been one of our pillars, so that’s what we’ve done. Also, we all grew up in the mortgage industry, so we saw firsthand the size of the market, but also how broken it was, so we wanted to change it.”
In launching the direct-to-consumer digital lending brand, the company was working to make the homebuying process more “digital, transparent and easier for consumers to access,” Snyder said.
At the same time, the company didn’t want to lose the human touch.
“We tried to design the app flow in a way where you can get as far along as you can in the application but if you want, at any point in time, to talk or chat with someone, we’re available,” Snyder added.
Image Credits: Lower
Lower’s typical customer is the millennial and now Gen Z who’s aspiring to own their first home, according to Snyder.
“They might be thinking, ‘OK, I might be living in an apartment now, but in the next few years I’m going to meet someone and/or have a child and I want to unlock the investment that is a home,’” he told TechCrunch. “And we’ll help them on that journey.”
Lower’s recently launched new app offers a deposit account it’s dubbed “HomeFund.” The interest-bearing, FDIC-insured deposit account offers a 0.75% Annual Percentage Yield and is designed to help consumers save for a home with a “dollar-for-dollar match in rewards” up to the first $1,000 saved, Snyder said.
Lower works with more than 35 major insurance carriers nationally, including Nationwide, Liberty Mutual and Allstate. It has more than 1,600 employees, about half of which are based in Lower’s home state. That’s up from about 650 employees in June of 2020.
Looking ahead, the company plans to add more services and has an “aggressive roadmap” for adding new features to its platform. Today, for example, Lower sells primarily to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while it services the majority of its loans, like many large lenders, it uses a subservicer. That will change, however, in early 2022, when Lower intends to launch its own native servicing platform.
And while the company intends to continue to run profitably, Snyder said he and his co-founders “think the time is now to gain share.”
“We want to become a global brand, raise money and gain market share,” he added. “We’re going to continue to double down on product and build out our capabilities. We are the best-kept secret in fintech and plan to change that with smart branding, advertising and sponsorships.”
And last but not least, Lower is eyeing the public markets as part of its longer-term roadmap.
“Ultimately, we know we can build a great public company,” Snyder told TechCrunch. “We’re of the scale to be a public company right now, but we’re going to keep our heads down and we’re going to keep building for the next few years and then I think we can be in a spot to be a strong public business.”
Accel’s Locke points out that in the U.S., mortgage and home finance are among the largest financial service markets, and they have primarily been handled by large banks.
“For most consumers, getting a mortgage through these banks continues to be an overly complex, slow-moving process,” Locke told TechCrunch. “We believe by providing consumers a great mobile experience, Lower will gain share from incumbent banks, in the same way that companies like Monzo have in banking or Venmo in payments or Trade Republic and Robinhood in stock trading.”
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Extra Crunch roundup: Guest posts wanted, ‘mango’ seed rounds, Expensify’s tech stack
Prospective contributors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about, and the answer is always the same:
- Actionable advice that is backed up by data and/or experience.
- Strategic insights that go beyond best practices and offer specific recommendations readers can try out for themselves.
- Industry analysis that paints a clear picture of the companies, products and services that characterize individual tech sectors.
Our submission guidelines haven’t changed, but Managing Editor Eric Eldon and I wrote a short post that identifies the topics we’re prioritizing at the moment:
- How-to articles for early-stage founders.
- Market analysis of different tech sectors.
- Growth marketing strategies.
- Alternative fundraising.
- Quality of life (personal health, sustainability, proptech, transportation).
If you’re a skillful entrepreneur, founder or investor who’s interested in helping someone else build their business, please read our latest guidelines, then send your ideas to guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.
Thanks for reading; I hope you have a great weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription
Opting for a debt round can take you from Series A startup to Series B unicorn
Image Credits: olegkalina (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw — it’s extremely valuable when used skillfully but can cause a lot of pain when mismanaged. This is a story about how it can go right.
Mario Ciabarra, the founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, breaks down how his company was on a “tremendous growth curve” — and then the pandemic hit.
“As the weeks following the initial shelter-in-place orders ticked by, the rush toward digital grew exponentially, and opportunities to secure new customers started piling up,” Ciabarra writes. “A solution to our money problems, perhaps? Not so fast — it was a classic case of needing to spend in order to make.”
If companies want to preserve equity, debt can be an advantageous choice. Here’s how Quantum Metric did it.
4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved
Image Credits: mucahiddin / Getty Images
People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.
A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hairstylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.
Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.
In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”
Twitter’s acquisition strategy: Eat the public conversation
Image Credits: We Are (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
What is a microblogging service doing buying a social podcasting company and a newsletter tool while also building a live broadcasting sub-app? Is there even a strategy at all?
Yes. Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed anywhere before. The alternative is nothing less than the destruction of Twitter into a link-forwarding service.
Let’s talk about how Twitter is trying to eat the public conversation.
Reading the IPO market’s tea leaves
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Although it was a truncated holiday week here in the United States, there was a bushel of IPO news. We sorted through the updates and came up with a series of sentiment calls regarding these public offerings.
Earlier this week, we took a look at:
- Marqeta‘s first IPO price range (fintech).
- 1st Dibs‘ first IPO price range (e-commerce).
- Zeta Global‘s IPO pricing (martech).
- The start of SoFi trading post-SPAC (fintech).
- The latest from BarkBox (e-commerce).
How Expensify hacked its way to a robust, scalable tech stack
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman
Part 4 of Expensify’s EC-1 digs into the company’s engineering and technology, with Anna Heim noting that the group of P2P pirates/hackers set out to build an expense management app by sticking to their gut and making their own rules.
They asked questions few considered, like: Why have lots of employees when you can find a way to get work done and reach impressive profitability with a few? Why work from an office in San Francisco when the internet lets you work from anywhere, even a sailboat in the Caribbean?
It makes sense in a way: If you’re a pirate, to hell with the rules, right?
With that in mind, one could assume Expensify decided to ask itself: Why not build our own totally custom tech stack?
Indeed, Expensify has made several tech decisions that were met with disbelief, but its belief in its own choices has paid off over the years, and the company is ready to IPO any day now.
How much of a tech advantage Expensify enjoys owing to such choices is an open question, but one thing is clear: These choices are key to understanding Expensify and its roadmap. Let’s take a look.
Etsy asks, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ with $1.6B Depop purchase
Image Credits: Getty Images
The news this week that e-commerce marketplace Etsy will buy Depop, a startup that provides a secondhand e-commerce marketplace, for more than $1.6 billion may not have made a large impact on the acquiring company’s share price thus far, but it provides a fascinating look into what brands may be willing to pay for access to the Gen Z market.
Etsy is buying Gen Z love. Think about it — Gen Z is probably not the first demographic that comes to mind when you consider Etsy, so you can see why the deal may pencil out in the larger company’s mind.
But it isn’t cheap. The lesson from the Etsy-Depop deal appears to be that large e-commerce players are willing to splash out for youth-approved marketplaces. That’s good news for yet-private companies that are popular with the budding generation.
Confluent’s IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets
Image Credits: Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images
Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork this week.
The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million last April.
What does Confluent do? It built a streaming data platform on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. In addition to its open-source roots, Confluent has a free tier of its commercial cloud offering to complement its paid products, helping generate top-of-funnel inflows that it converts to sales.
What we can see in Confluent is nearly an old-school, high-burn SaaS business. It has taken on oodles of capital and used it in an increasingly expensive sales model.
How to win consulting, board and deal roles with PE and VC funds
Image Credits: Orla (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds?
There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds, and those jobs are highly competitive.
However, there are many other ways you can work and earn money within the industry — as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence or as an entrepreneur in residence.
Let’s take a look at the different ways you can work with the investment community.
The existential cost of decelerated growth
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.
Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.
Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.
Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.
Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.
Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.
Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?
Image Credits: Carol Yepes (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
There is a growing group of entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom.
Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving, and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.
Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.
Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.
3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors
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Two years ago, founders of calendar assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.
Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.
“So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we’d been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy,” he writes.
Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”
For SaaS startups, differentiation is an iterative process
Image Credits: Kevin Schafer / Getty Images
Although software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud, ActiveCampaign founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom writes in a guest column.
“We’ve all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with deal sizes and valuations steadily climbing. But as tech industry watchers know only too well, large funding rounds and valuations are not foolproof indicators of sustainable growth and longevity.”
VandeBoom notes that to scale sustainably, SaaS startups need to “stand apart from the herd at every phase of development. Failure to do so means a poor outcome for founders and investors.”
“As a founder who pivoted from on-premise to SaaS back in 2016, I have focused on scaling my company (most recently crossing 145,000 customers) and in the process, learned quite a bit about making a mark,” VandeBoom writes. “Here is some advice on differentiation at the various stages in the life of a SaaS startup.”
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4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved
Customers have been “experiencing” business since the ancient Romans browsed the Forum for produce, pottery and leather goods. But digitization has radically recalibrated the buyer-seller dynamic, fueling the rise of one of the most talked-about industry acronyms: CX (customer experience).
Part paradigm, part category and part multibillion-dollar market, CX is a broad term used across a myriad of contexts. But great CX boils down to delighting every customer on an emotional level, anytime and anywhere a business interaction takes place.
Great CX boils down to delighting every customer on an emotional level, anytime and anywhere a business interaction takes place.
Optimizing CX requires a sophisticated tool stack. Customer behavior should be tracked, their needs must be understood, and opportunities to engage proactively must be identified. Wall Street, for one, is taking note: Qualtrics, the creator of “XM” (experience management) as a category, was spun-out from SAP and IPO’d in January, and Sprinklr, a social media listening solution that has expanded into a “Digital CXM” platform, recently filed to go public.
Thinking critically about customer experience is hardly a new concept, but a few factors are spurring an inflection point in investment by enterprises and VCs.
Firstly, brands are now expected to create a consistent, cohesive experience across multiple channels, both online and offline, with an ever-increasing focus on the former. Customer experience and the digital customer experience are rapidly becoming synonymous.
The sheer volume of customer data has also reached new heights. As a McKinsey report put it, “Today, companies can regularly, lawfully, and seamlessly collect smartphone and interaction data from across their customer, financial, and operations systems, yielding deep insights about their customers … These companies can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys. Their customers are reaping benefits: Think quick compensation for a flight delay, or outreach from an insurance company when a patient is having trouble resolving a problem.”
Moreover, the app economy continues to raise the bar on user experience, and end users have less patience than ever before. Each time Netflix displays just the right movie, Instagram recommends just the right shoes, or TikTok plays just the right dog video, people are being trained to demand just a bit more magic.
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Why calendar invites are worth $3B
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace hopped online for our weekly show, sans Gamestop news (which you can find here) to talk about all the other busy news happening in startup world right now.
Here’s a taste of what we got into:
- Qualtrics IPO pricing, and the future of major acquisition pricing schemes. This company’s path to the public markets has been a long-time coming, so we had plenty to say.
- How Atlanta’s Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3 billion company. This story was not only neat, but also operated as a sort of palate cleanser for the team.
- Rhino‘s interesting insurtech play, and how it is pre-IPO pretty damn early. Revenue questions, the power of insurtech, and public markets impacting startups? This story had it all!
- Alex talks about how Fast is raising fast money ($102 million to be exact). Even more, the Fast story fits into a broader narrative of online checkout startups raising a zillion dollars in recent weeks.
- A boom in food delivery and restaurant startups, and why Danny is bearish on a plastic-free play. Natasha is in favor. Alex gets a company’s model mixed up with Spoon Rocket.
- Natasha explains how Clubhouse isn’t the first company to raise millions off of millions of users with no known near-term monetization plan. Her piece on ClassDojo illustrates how a quiet edtech giant finally turned its 51 million users into a profitable base. There’s also a new edtech investor survey for you to check out (Discount code: EQUITY).
- TCV’s record fund, and a female-focused angel fund coming out of Africa.
As always, it was a ton to get through because there is just so much going on. More Monday morning, until then stay cool!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts
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After soaring above $23B, Qualtrics’ founder and CEO reflect on a stellar debut
Amidst all of the the sturm und drang of l’affaire GameStop, Qualtrics went public today.
After pricing its stock above its raised IPO range, the company received a warm welcome from public investors. After starting its trading life worth $41.85, Qualtrics closed the day worth $45.50, up some 51.67%.
Qualtrics did everything that it said it was going to.
The software company’s debut comes after a lengthy path to the public markets; Qualtrics sold to SAP on the eve of its first run at a public listing back in 2018. Now, SAP has completed spinning the company out, though the software giant remains the Utah unicorn’s largest shareholder.
That Qualtrics’ IPO might perform well was presaged in its pricing run, having prices far above its initial valuation estimates; there was evidence of strong demand even before its shares started to trade.
But did Qualtrics misprice, given its strong first-day performance? TechCrunch spoke with Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin, and its founder and current executive chairman Ryan Smith about its public offering, hoping to learn a bit about what is next for the company.
Pricing, plans
Having spoken to myriad folks on IPO days, I’ve learned the best way to kick off is to ask about emotions. Most CEOs and other execs are tied up in what they can (and cannot) say. And they are well-trained by communications experts regarding what to repeat and emphasize. You can sometimes loosen them up a little, however, by asking them how they feel.
In response to that question, Serafin described a feeling of gratitude and Smith brought up the long game. Qualtrics, he said, had been told that it couldn’t bootstrap, that it couldn’t build in Utah, that SAP had overpaid, that SAP had messed up and so forth.
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A first look at Qualtrics’ IPO pricing
Earlier today, Qualtrics dropped a new S-1 filing, this time detailing its proposed IPO pricing. That means we can now get a good look at how much the company may be worth when it goes public later this month.
The debut has been one TechCrunch has been looking forward to since the company announced that it would be spun out from its erstwhile corporate parent, SAP. In 2019, the Germany-based enterprise giant SAP snatched up Qualtrics for $8 billion just before it was to go public.
Qualtrics is either worth less than we would have guessed, or its first IPO range feels light.
That figure provides a good marker for how well SAP has done with the deal and how much value Qualtrics has generated in the intervening years. Keep in mind, however, that the value of software companies has risen greatly in the last few years, so the numbers we’ll see below benefit from a market-wide repricing of recurring revenue.
Qualtrics estimates that it may be worth $22 to $26 per share when it goes public. Is that a lot? Let’s find out.
Qualtrics’ first IPO range
First, scale. Qualtrics is selling just under 50 million shares in its public offering. As you can math out, at more than $20 per share, the company is looking to raise north of $1 billion.
After going public, Qualtrics anticipates having 510,170,610 shares outstanding, inclusive of its 7.4 million underwriter option. Using that simple share count, Qualtrics would be worth $11.2 billion to $13.3 billion.
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The big question on every startup’s mind for 2021
My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we’re in the early innings of seeing what “aha moments” have materialized into companies. And we won’t know the pandemic’s true impact on our psyches until the dust settles and we have an opportunity to reflect.
We do know it will be fascinating to watch. In 2020, innovators and investors were forced to stand still, and witness cracks, fractures and rubble in society in a way like never before. It was a humbling year that, for much of the tech community, was mostly spent inside, away and alone.
One reaction I’ve noticed so far — that isn’t necessarily new but comes with new weight — is a rush of innovation that focuses on reducing friction. Take trends like the rise of building in public or the unbundling of venture capital. Or remote work’s shift from enabling communication to now needing to enable passive and active collaboration. Apply the same idea to mental health, education and fitness. Heck, we’re even seeing people take the Y Combinator format and apply it to anything that makes sense, from helping operators turn into investors to helping employees try to turn their side gig into a full-time company.
While these movements didn’t begin because of the coronavirus, they all seem to have a huge, pandemic-sized asterisk next to it.
It would be easy to dismiss these movements as small and inconsequential. But, as my colleague and fellow Equity co-host Danny Crichton pointed out this week, “sometimes the most important changes in venture and startups more generally have come from lowering that last bit of friction to action.”
Lowering friction feels like the mantra with which we all need to enter 2021.
I already have hope that innovation will come from a more diverse set of people, whether it’s in a hacker house for undergraduate women or a student-founded service that matches undergraduate students to nonprofits. So, as we enter the new year — and bear with me here — I urge you to be optimistic.
The last year in tech hasn’t left people exhausted and hopeless, it’s left them energized and ready.
Maze, computer artwork. (Image Credits: Pasieka / Getty Images)
Will the second time be the charm for Qualtrics?
When SAP announced that Qualtrics was getting spun out in July, the full-circle moment made the Equity podcast crew jump to our mics with guesses around why. Now, months later, there’s a new S-1 filing, and more to color in. Alex Wilhelm broke down the Utah-based unicorn’s numbers, noting that it’s the second time Qualtrics has filed.
Will the second time be the charm that Qualtrics needs to actually go public this time around? I’ll let you make the call yourself once you sift through Alex’s analysis of the valuation and financials.
Blackboard Business Strategy Concept. (Image Credits: hanibaram / Getty Images)
Miami, Substack and Clubhouse
If those three words in a single subhed elicit a certain reaction from you, Danny Crichton has a bone to pick with you. He wrote a piece this week about tech’s cynicism around anything new, underscoring how Miami’s future as a tech hub, Substack’s future as a replacement for traditional journalism and Clubhouse’s future as a social media disruptor have come under fire as expected:
The cynicism of immediate perfection is one of the strange dynamics of startups in 2020. There is this expectation that a startup, with one or a few founders and a couple of employees, is somehow going to build a perfect product on day one that mitigates any potential problem even before it becomes one. Maybe these startups are just getting popularized too early, and the people who understand early product are getting subsumed by the wider masses who don’t understand the evolution of products?
Danny’s argument is to give these companies a little more grace to execute on a vision they themselves are not even close to scratching the surface of. When it comes to holding specific decision-makers and businesses to a certain standard, I prefer a more fluid conversation. But I do agree that writing off a business because it hasn’t done everything correctly from the start can hurt progress. It’s easy to be grumpy, but why not choose to be an optimist? Tell me your optimistic bets by responding to this newsletter or tweeting me @nmasc_.
Skyline of downtown Miami, Florida looking toward the Brickell neighborhood on Biscayne Bay. Brickell is one of the largest financial districts in the United States and also has many high-rise residential condominium and apartment towers. (Image Credits: John Coletti / Getty Images)
And some good news
Speaking of humbling moments and optimism, our own Sarah Perez wrote a piece this week about EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children. While Acorns and Stash have similar offerings, EarlyBird is bringing a fresh UX play to financial literacy, freedom and education. There’s a ton of work left to be done, hurdles to deal with, and giant unicorns to compete with. EarlyBird, however, is only weeks old, so there’s much to watch out for.
VP Caleb Frankel, now EarlyBird COO, explained the early inspiration:
“This all started with a problem I experienced years ago when my beautiful baby niece was born. I found myself head over heels and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on just the most ridiculous stuff — pretty much just junk gifts,” he says. “I wanted to have a larger impact in her life and something that she could really use when she grew up.”
Image Credits: oxygen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
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@EquityPod
The Equity pod put together a 2021 predictions episode (with Chris Gates, our producer, making a guest appearance on the mic as well!). We talk about IPO candidates, San Francisco and the future of drugs.
2020 brought several million downloads to the podcast, and we’re super thankful to all of y’ all for tuning in. This year will be even bigger, better and, hey, maybe we’ll even get to make fun of each other in person too.
Till next week,
Natasha Mascarenhas
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Unpacking Qualtrics’ brand-new S-1 filing
The Exchange is taking a break from vacation to dig into the new Qualtrics S-1 filing. Then the column and newsletter are back on hold until January 4.
This afternoon, Qualtrics, a software company that helps companies poll their employee base, customers and others, filed to go public. It’s the second time that the Utah-based unicorn has done so, failing the first time to complete its offering after SAP swooped in and bought it for around $8 billion in cash.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
SAP announced in late July of this year that Qualtrics would be spun out via an IPO, bringing the smaller company’s saga full-circle.
The new S-1 filing — you can view the 2018 original here — is a different animal from the first. First, Qualtrics is larger than it was, and older. And its financials are more complex as it extricates itself from its soon-to-be-erstwhile corporate parent.
Qualtrics intends to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “XM.”
Looking back at my chat with Ryan Smith, then Qualtrics CEO and today its chairman, and Bill McDermott, then SAP’s CEO and today the CEO of ServiceNow, it’s hard to believe that the acquisition deal was only two years ago.
Much has changed since late 2018. Let’s see what happened to Qualtrics in the meantime. We’ll dig into the financials, the company’s implied valuation range (spoiler: It has gone up) and whatever else we can shake loose.
The new Qualtrics S-1
A few things up top. First, SAP will be the company’s controlling shareholder after the Qualtrics’ IPO. That’s early in the S-1 filing. And, Smith and Silver Lake are investing in the company as part of its new debut.
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Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith is buying majority stake in the Utah Jazz for $1.6B
The Utah Jazz, an NBA basketball team based in Salt Lake City, announced today that Qualtrics CEO and co-founder Ryan Smith was buying a majority stake in the team, along with other properties. ESPN is reporting the deal is worth $1.6 billion.
Smith can afford it. He sold Qualtrics, which is based in Provo, Utah, in 2018 to SAP for $8 billion just before the startup was about to go public. Earlier this year, SAP announced plans to spin out Qualtrics as a public company.
In addition to The Jazz, he’s also getting Vivint Smart Home Arena, the National Basketball Association (NBA) G League team Salt Lake City Stars and management of the Triple-A baseball affiliate Salt Lake Bees. Smith is buying the properties from the Miller family, who have run them for more than three decades.
Smith was over the moon about being able to buy into a franchise he has supported over the years. “My wife and I are absolutely humbled and excited about the opportunity to take the team forward far into the future – especially with the greatest fans in the NBA. The Utah Jazz, the state of Utah, and its capital city are the beneficiaries of the Millers’ tremendous love, generosity and investment. We look forward to building upon their lifelong work,” he said in a statement.
The deal is pending approval of the NBA Board of Governors, but once that happens, Smith will have full decision-making authority over the franchise.
Qualtrics, which makes customer survey tools, was founded in 2002 and raised more than $400 million from firms like Accel, Insight Partners and Sequoia before selling the company two years ago to SAP.
Smith is not the first tech billionaire to buy a basketball team. He joins Mark Cuban, who bought the Dallas Mavericks in 1999 after selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion that same year, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who bought the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014 for $2 billion.
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