After launching its IPO last week with an expected listing price range of $26 to $29 per share, cybersecurity company SentinelOne is going tomorrow with some momentum behind it. Sources close to the tell us that the company, which will be trading under the ticker “S” on the New York Stock Exchange, is expecting to raise over $1 billion in its IPO, putting its valuation at around $10 billion.
Last week, when the company first announced the IPO, it was projected that it would raise $928 million at the top end of its range, giving SentinelOne a valuation of around $7 billion. Coming in at a $10 billion market capitalization would make SentinelOne the most valuable cybersecurity IPO to date.
A source said that the road show has been stronger than anticipated, in part because of the strength of one of its competitors, CrowdStrike, which is publicly traded and currently sitting at a market cap of $58 billion.
The other reason for the response is a slightly grimmer one: cybersecurity continues to be a major issue for businesses of all sizes, public organizations, governments and individuals. “No one wants to see another SolarWinds, and there is no reason that there shouldn’t be more than one or two strong players,” a source said.
As is the bigger trend in cybersecurity, Israel-hatched, Mountain View-based SentinelOne‘s approach to combat that is artificial intelligence — and in its case specifically, a machine learning-based solution that it sells under the brand Singularity that focuses on endpoint security, working across the entire edge of the network to monitor and secure laptops, phones, containerised applications and the many other devices and services connected to a network.
Last year, endpoint security solutions were estimated to be around an $8 billion market, and analysts project that it could be worth as much as $18.4 billion by 2024 — another reason why SentinelOne may have moved up the timetable on its IPO (last year the company’s CEO Tomer Weingarten had told me he thought the company had one or two years left as a private company before considering an IPO, a timeline it clearly decided was worth speeding up).
SentinelOne raised $267 million on a $3.1 billion valuation led by Tiger Global as recently as last November, but it has been expanding rapidly. Growth last quarter was 116% compared to the same period a year before, and it now has more than 4,700 customers and annual recurring revenue of $161 million, according to its S-1 filing. It is also still not profitable, posting a net loss of $64 million in the last quarter.