:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63710317/20150421-untitled126.0.1510620665.0.jpg)
Business analytics company Domo moved at the speed of a snail in its formative years, taking almost half a decade to creep out of stealth mode. But now, mere weeks after launching to consumers, it’s warp speed ahead.
The company will be ready to go public in six months, said Domo CEO Josh James at Code Enterprise: San Francisco today. That doesn’t mean it will actually do so — it’s going to wait for the right timing. James said to expect 12 to 18 months.
That’s still a rapidly approaching date given the world didn’t even know what Domo was until it launched this month. Domo allows companies to track and see data about their business. It pulls in information from 400 other services and sources, like business applications from Microsoft, Workday and Oracle, and turns them into pretty graphs and charts. That information runs the operational gamut — employees’ salary, supply inventory, equipment measurements, etc.
Perhaps the most striking example of Domo’s potential came at the end of the interview, when James described how NBC* is using its software. According to James, NBC tracks in real time which channels its viewers are visiting after leaving NBC. If it sees that a lot of people are leaving to watch Fox, and Fox is airing a segment on Niagra Falls freezing, then NBC can adjust its broadcast strategy.
With an accomplished serial founder in James and four years of mystery that shrouded Domo in development, the company is as close to “sexy” as an enterprise deal gets. In its most recent funding round, it landed a $2 billion valuation with $450 million in funding despite the fact that it only has 1/20th the number of customers as its competitor Tableau (valued at $7 billion).
“How do you justify [that]?” Re/code’s Arik Hesseldahl asked during the interview.
James argued that Domo’s valuation came from its customer conversion rate. Once a business signs some people up for the service, that number quickly grows, and for each new head they pay more cash. “Our revenue retention of our customers is over 150 percent,” James said. “Nobody’s ever really seen that in software.”
* NBCUniversal is a minority investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
