TubeMogul Files For $75M IPO, With $57M In Revenue And A $7M Net Loss For 2013

Video ad platform TubeMogul has filed its S-1, declaring its plans to go public with an offering of up to $75 million. And it’s doing so with what appears to be pretty healthy gross margins, though with an overall net loss.

Once upon a time, TubeMogul was a video analytics company. But somewhere along the line, it morphed into an ad-buying platform that aggregates premium and transparent inventory sources.

In contrast to some of the other online ad companies out there, TubeMogul is more of a software-as-a-service play than it is a typical ad network, and its financials support that. Instead of just counting all the money that crosses its path on its top line, it breaks out the difference between “spend” and “revenue.”

Total spend on TubeMogul for 2013 was $111.9 million, which was up from $53.4 million the year before. And 2013 revenue was $57.2 million, up 67 percent from $34.2 million in the prior year.

TubeMogul also has SaaS-like gross margins, at 66 percent in 2013. Gross profit for the company was $37.5 million in 2013, compared to $17.8 million in 2012. However, the company’s net loss (which represents its gross margins minus the cost of sales) was $7.4 million, up from $3.6 million the year before.

(By comparison, when YuMe filed to go public last year, it had $116.7 million in revenue but net income of $6.3 million.)

TubeMogul’s IPO filing follows a number of recent exits in the video ad space. Tremor and YuMe both went public last year, while Adap.tv and FreeWheel were recently acquired by AOL and Comcast, respectively.

The company’s S-1 says that its plans for growth include global expansion, moving into TV advertising, and shifting customers to its Platform Direct (so away from its services business). As for risk factors, TubeMogul points to its past and current losses, as well as its dependence on ad agencies for business.

TubeMogul previously raised more than $50 million in funding. The biggest shareholders include Trinity Ventures (which owns 26.5 percent of the company prior to the IPO), Foundation Capital (22.7 percent), Northgate Capital (8 percent), co-founder and CEO Brett Wilson (8.8 percent), and co-founder and President of Products John E. Hughes (8.6 percent).