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The business software company Domo, last valued at over $2 billion, is moving to go public, Recode has learned.
Domo last week held its “organizational meeting,” which generally serves as the formal kickoff in advance of an IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to sources. The company is pursuing a confidential filing with the SEC; it isn’t clear if the company has already filed or instead will do so within the next few weeks.
The filing would be the latest IPO in a flurry of listings, especially in the enterprise sector. And it would offer a payday to the cross section of venture funds that have financed the eight-year-old company’s growth, like GGV Capital, TPG and Benchmark.
It would also be a substantial exit for the so-called Silicon Slopes region of Utah: Domo, led by prominent entrepreneur Josh James, is based in a suburb of Salt Lake City. James is well known as the co-founder of Omniture, an analytics company that was sold to Adobe for almost $2 billion.
Domo declined to comment.
Domo has long teased an IPO — James told Recode as early as April 2015 that his company would be ready to go public in the next six months. And a company could always back off after the so-called org meeting or even after the filing, but this is a definite step in the IPO planning process.
The org meeting typically begins a one- to two-month process that includes the drafting of the paperwork that is filed with the SEC. The company’s leadership, its board, lawyers, bankers and financial advisers gather to chart how and when exactly the company will file and sell itself to Wall Street. A company though isn’t bound to file, and could eventually delay the listing, back off altogether or get acquired at the last minute.
The company hired banks to advise their IPO as far back as April 2016, but its momentum toward a public offering had stalled. Domo raised another round of financing in early 2017, pushing back the IPO as part of an attempt, as James said at the time, to remain private as long as humanly possible.
After somehow operating in stealth for almost five years, Domo emerged in 2015 with a $2 billion valuation. The company offers to businesses a portal that visualizes company and customer data — a live view of all sorts of things a CEO might need to know about his or her company in one software platform. Competitors include the still-private Looker and the now-public Tableau Software.
Domo’s IPO would be the latest high-profile listing at a time when private companies apparently feel the public markets will be friendly to startups. Spotify and Dropbox shares have begun trading over just the last few weeks, and a pair of other cloud-based companies, Zscaler and Zuora, have filed to follow suit this spring.
Advising Domo’s offering are Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. The banks declined to comment.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
