This week, application performance management vendor New Relic announced it had filed an S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as a step toward executing an initial public offering of its common stock aimed at raising roughly $100M. The IPO will be underwritten by Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Allen & Company and UBS in collaboration with JMP Securities and Raymond James & Associates. While the precise number of shares and their initial share price remains to be determined, New Relic revealed plans to trade shares under the stock ticker symbol NEWR. For the fiscal year 2014, New Relic has raised $215M in capital to date, with its most recent capital raise occurring in April 2014 in a round that raised $100M led by BlackRock, Inc. and Passport Capital, LLC. New Relic registered a loss of $40.2M on $63.2M in revenue. From September 30, 2013 to September 30, 2014, New Relic’s employee headcount increased from 315 to 534 while its total number of paying customers correspondingly increased from 7,552 to 10,590 over the same time period.
New Relic’s IPO announcement marks the second company this week in which Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton sits on the board of directors to seek $100M in IPO funding. Earlier this week, Hadoop vendor Hortonworks announced that it had similarly filed an S-1 for an IPO this Monday. New Relic’s S-1 filing lists HP, IBM, Oracle, BMC Software, SAP, AppDynamics, Splunk, Google and Webtrends amongst its competitors. New Relic’s announcement of its decision to pursue an IPO constitutes a watershed moment in enterprise IT insofar as its SaaS-based application performance management (APM) software claims deep integration with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine. New Relic’s success in building analytics and performance management platforms for cloud-based infrastructures renders it an increasingly important fixture in enterprise IT, particularly as cloud adoption continues to accelerate throughout the enterprise.
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