Tag: SurveyMonkey

A monkey riding a bull

Mark Fontecchio

by Brenon Daly

Already valued at about $2bn in the private market, SurveyMonkey held that ‘double unicorn’ valuation as it debuted in the public market. The company priced its upsized offering above the expected range, and watched the freshly printed stock jump about 50% on the Nasdaq. Yet even with all that bullishness, the IPO was more about value confirmation than value accretion.

Still, the online survey provider does enjoy a rather healthy valuation. With roughly 125 million shares outstanding (on a nondiluted basis), Wall Street is valuing SurveyMonkey at about $2.25bn. That’s roughly nine times the 2018 revenue that we project for company. (Our math: So far this year, SurveyMonkey has increased revenue about 14%. Assuming that rate holds through the second half of this year, 2018 sales would come in at about $250m.)

In the IPO, the company raised $180m plus another $40m from a separate direct sale to Salesforce Ventures. That goes on top of the roughly $1bn that the company had previously raised in debt and equity. The company’s main backer, hedge fund Tiger Capital Management, still owns about one-quarter of the company. (In addition to being the largest shareholder of SurveyMonkey, Tiger is also its largest customer, according to the company’s prospectus.)

Having probably taken in all the financing it could reasonably expect to collect as a private company, SurveyMonkey might well look at today’s IPO as a necessity. (It will be using $100m of the proceeds to pay off its debt.) The fact that Wall Street investors received the dot-com survivor so warmly not only splashes a bit of liquidity in the 19-year-old company, but may have other companies of its scale and vintage also give a closer look at the public market. As everyone on Wall Street knows, you always want to sell into demand.

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Monkeying around on Wall Street

Mark Fontecchio
by Brenon Daly
After closing out a busy first half of 2018 with a lackluster offering, the tech IPO market isn’t looking like it will start the second half much stronger. SurveyMonkey has publicly filed its prospectus on an offering that will test Wall Street’s appetite for money-losing companies that don’t offset the red ink with sizzling revenue growth. The company’s age (19 years old) is higher than its growth rate (currently 14%).

Founded at the tail end of the frothy years of the dot-com bubble, the online survey provider has nonetheless enjoyed a frothy valuation of its own as it collected more than $1bn in debt and equity funding. Private-market investors have put a $2bn price on the company. SurveyMonkey’s ‘double unicorn’ valuation works out to about 8x this year’s projected revenue.

However, our forecast for a quarter-billion dollars in 2018 revenue assumes the company can continue its mid-teen growth. (That may not be a given, since SurveyMonkey increased sales just 6% in 2017.) For comparison, Dropbox – a similarly heavily funded startup that, like SurveyMonkey, also relies on lots of users choosing, at some point, to pay for the service – came to market earlier this year growing 30%. And the online collaboration vendor does more sales in a single quarter than SurveyMonkey does all year.

So Wall Street will undoubtedly scrutinize SurveyMonkey’s financial performance, which shows revenue increasing at just one-half to one-quarter the pace of other software IPOs this year. And they will look even harder at the offering since investors are still underwater from the most-recent tech IPO, Domo. Like SurveyMonkey, the BI specialist had probably drawn in as much money as it could get from private-market investors, so it turned to Wall Street. That’s hardly a compelling pitch for investors.

For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.