Cloud Hosting

Samsara Inc. said Wednesday its initial public offering priced at $23 a share and will start trading later in the day as it hopes to grab a share of an estimated $55 billion market to digitize the operations of non-tech companies.

The stock will trade under the ticker IOT on the New York Stock Exchange. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Allen & Co. were lead underwriters in a syndicate of 16 banks working on the deal.

Last week, the company estimated pricing its shares between $20 and $23 apiece.

Founded in 2015, Samsara IOT offers a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to use Internet-of-Things connected devices that can range from video cameras to data-collecting equipment to help run operations. Here are five things to look for:

Unlike retail, advertising, media, and information technology, which have already undergone digital transformation, industries with physical operations are still in the early stages of digital adoption, the company said in its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company estimates a total addressable market of about $54.6 billion by the end of 2021, and $96.9 billion by the end of 2024.

Just for telematics alone or monitoring cars and trucks and other mobile equipment Samsara estimates a market opportunity of $32.9 billion market in 2021, and $63.7billion in 2024, based on Gartner estimates.

The company cited operational efficiencies from using their platform from a large freight carrier, a large city government, a waste transportation company, and a crane, rigging and heavy transport company.

While connected devices are now everywhere in our personal lives, it may surprise you to learn how much pen-and-paper is still being used in the industries that keep our planet running, said co-founder John Bicket and Sanjit Biswas, co-founderand chief executive, in a founders letter in the filing.

The possibilities are practically endless: we estimate that the industries we serve account for over a third of the global economy, and its easy to imagine a future when every asset has a chip in it and is connected to the cloud, they said.

Samsara reported annual recurring revenue, or ARR, of $492.8 million as of Oct. 30, compared with $293.1 million in the year previous. ARR is a metric often used by software-as-a-service companies to show how much revenue the company can expect based on subscriptions.

That comes from 13,000 core customers, which account for $5,000 or more ARR, as of Oct. 30. More importantly, Samsara said that the number of its customers that pay more than $100,000 for its services surged 83% to 715 compared with 390 a year ago.

The company reported annual revenue of $249.9 million for a loss of $210.2 million for the fiscal year ending Jan. 30, 2021, compared with $119.9 million and a loss of $225.2 million in the previous year.

So far, for the nine months ending Oct. 30, Samsara reported revenue of $302.6million for a loss of $102.3million, compared with $174million in revenue and a loss of $174million .

Samsara said in its filing that expected proceeds of about $819.9 million will go to generic things like operations and to create a public market for its stock, but a significant chunk of the IPO money is going to settle restricted stock units.

Specifically, about $124.2 million in proceeds will go to a restricted stock unit settlement based on a midpoint pricing estimate of $21.50 a share. The settlement involves anticipated tax withholding and remittance obligations and an assumed 33.6% tax withholding rate, the company said.

Samsara said no specific company competes toe-to-toe with its connected operations cloud suite.

Vendors like Verizon Communications Inc.s VZ, +0.80% Verizon Connect and Geotab offer driver management and GPS tracking tools, and Motorola Solutions Inc.s MSI, -1.01% Avigilon specializes in video analytics, AI, and network video management software.

Samsara, however, also lists Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.68% as a potential rival and that could spell trouble.

For example, we rely upon Amazon for AWS web hosting and we do not currently have an alternative provider, Samsara said in the filing. If Amazon decided to compete with us and did not allow us to renew our commercial agreement, this may have a significant impact on our solution and would require that we allocate time and expense to setting up our Connected Operations Cloud on an alternative hosting service.

The offering is for shares of our ClassA stock, which get one vote per share, unlike ClassB shares that get 10 votes per share.

Many IPOs of late have had early backers of the company commanding a majority stake in the company, and therefore, majority voting power. Thats not the case with Samsara.

The company raised $930 million in funding prior to the IPO, according to Crunchbase data. Of those early investors, Andreessen Horowitz will have 17.5% of the votes after the offering, while General Catalyst has 9.7% of the votes.

On the other hand CEO Biswas will retain 24.8% of the votes, while co-founder Bicket retains 24.3%.

Read the original:
Samsara IPO: 5 things about the cloud-based operations company - MarketWatch