Care to guess how much a business is worth if it does $250mn in sales and loses $140mn on those sales?

According to the public market post-IPO…..around $11 billion.

This can’t last and will only end in tears as it has EVERY time before.

CrowdStrike rocketed as much as 97% in its first day of trading on the public market on Wednesday. The security software vendor opened trading at $63.50 after it priced its IPO at $34 a share, above the high end of its expected range of $28 to $30 per share.

The stock settled to a pop of more than 73%, pushing its market cap over $11 billion, nearly quadruple the valuation from its last private round in June 2018. The company is worth about as much as 37-year-old security software provider Symantec despite having about 5% as much revenue.

CrowdStrike, trading on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol “CRWD,” joins a rapidly growing 2019 IPO class, which already includes UberLyft and Pinterest. In the business software market, CrowdStrike follows the debuts of Zoom and PagerDuty and comes just a head of Slack’s direct listing.

With the first-day surge, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is a billionaire, and the company’s early backers are notching huge returns. Warburg Pincus owns a stake worth over $3 billion. Accel’s stake is valued at over $2 billion, and Alphabet’s CapitalG controls shares worth over $1 billion.

CrowdStrike, whose cloud-based technology is used to detect and prevent breaches, recorded a net loss of $140 million for the year ended Jan. 31, while revenue more than doubled to $249.8 million, according to the company’s prospectus.

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on google
Scroll to Top