NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Report claims cloud comms company Twilio has secretly filed for an IPO in 2016
Cloud communications company Twilio, Inc. may be one step closer to an initial public offering with a report on Christmas Day that it might be happening … again.
According to The Wall Street Journal quoting the proverbial “people familiar with the matter,” Twilio has filed confidentially for its IPO and is working with banks, including Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. on the deal.
Although no firm timeline is locked in, the report claims that the IPO could happen as soon as the first quarter of 2016.
Talk of a Twilio IPO first emerged in February 2015 when Twilio investor Scott Raney of Redpoint Ventures said that the company is in a strong position financially and that it would prepare itself this year (2015) for an initial public offering by putting internal processes in place, but no IPO date has been set.
“There’s no rush to go public,” Raney added. “This is a company that’s easy to finance.”
Since that report, Twilio raised $130 million Series E in the middle of the year (news of the round first emerged in May but was later confirmed in July) on a unicorn valuation of $1.1 billion.
At the time of the round being confirmed, we speculated as to whether an IPO might now be off the table given that a late-stage investment such as this may have acted as more of an exit for some existing investors versus a needed capital raising; this is clearly no longer the case.
Busy new year
Presuming the report is accurate, Twilio will join Nutanix, Inc. in going public in the first quarter, along with a potential IPO from cloud-based enterprise software Coupa Software, Inc.
It will make for a busy new year in the tech IPO space after somewhat mixed results in 2015, with the notable exception of Atlassian PLC in December, which was rightly hailed as a positive sign for the year ahead.
Twilio’s financials coming into a potential IPO are not clear and won’t be until its IPO documents become public, but it heads into a float with a strong product that boasts of an A-list client base that includes Uber, AirBnB, OpenTable, Box, Home Depot, eHarmony, The Coca-Cola Co. and many more.
Prior to its IPO, Twilio had raised $233.7 million from investors, including Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Bessemer Venture Partners, K9 Ventures, 500 Startups, Union Square Ventures, SV Angel and others.
Image credit: gangplankhq/Flickr/CC by 2.0
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