Yet another San Francisco-based company looks to be going public imminently. PagerDuty, an 8.5-year-old startup that sends a wide range of companies information about their technology, just filed its S-1, a public disclosure about its IPOs plans.
PagerDuty, which helps companies quickly respond to IT incidents, as well as increasingly tries to anticipate them, had reportedly filed confidentially several months ago, but the 35-day government shutdown meant that no one could review its prospectus (or that of other companies) at the time.
According to a January story from Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley is leading the offering.
We’ve reached out to the company for more information. In the meantime, the offering says it seeks to raise $100 million, an amount that’s frequently used as a placeholder.
PagerDuty was valued at $1.3 billion last fall when it closed on $90 million in Series D funding led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Wellington Management. Earlier backers Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, which brought the company’s total funding to $173 million.
According to the S-1, venture investors currently own about 55 percent of the company. Andreessen Horowitz owns the biggest stake, with 18.4 percent of its shares sailing into the IPO. Accel meanwhile owns 12.3 recent, Bessemer owns 12.2 percent, Baseline Ventures owns 6.7 percent, and Harrison Metal owns 5.3 percent.
PagerDuty, which employed 500 employees as of last fall, has never been profitable according to its filing, which says it generated a net loss of $38.1 million for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018. (It saw revenue of $79.6 million during the same period.)
The risk factors for the company hold few, if any, surprises, including competition and management changes. Another risk is security. In fact, the company reveals in its S-1 that its security measures have, in the past, been compromised and notes that they could be again, which isn’t nothing, considering how much information PagerDuty requires to execute its work, including the personally identifiable information of its clients, including contact information and physical location.
As the filing notes, cyber incidents and malicious internet-based activity continues to increase generally, putting pretty much every organization at risk.
We profiled the company’s CEO, Jennifer Tejada, last fall. She joined the company in 2016 after previously serving as the CEO Keynote Systems, a company that specialized in developing and marketing software as a service and which as since merged with another company. For roughly the last year, she has also been a director on the board of the cosmetics giant Estee Lauder.
Tejada owns 6.4 percent of PagerDuty, shows the filing. Meanwhile, PagerDuty cofounders Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, both of whom have since left the company, each own a 7.1 percent stake.
Assuming PagerDuty’s plans move forward without a hitch, Tejada will join a small but growing list of women CEOs who’ve taken the tech companies they lead public, including Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz and Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake.
PagerDuty also looks to be joining at least a handful of startups that are situated in San Francisco proper and planning to go public in 2019, including Slack, Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, and, very likely, Airbnb.
Little wonder the city’s Board of Supervisors is trying to prepare for how the influx of even more wealth will impact life for its already crowded residents, many of whom are already struggling to afford life in San Francisco, where everything from rent to restaurant bills have been steadily rising for years.
The cost of buying a home is expected to rise, too. As cited in SF Weekly, a recent study completed by academics from UCLA and Pennsylvania State University titled “Cash to Spend: IPO Wealth and House Prices” analyzed the impact of IPOs in California between 1993 and 2017. What it discovered, unsurprisingly: that home prices within 10 miles of the company’s headquarters rose on average one percent after the filing date and another .8 percent after the company went public.