Anaplan
Anaplan CEO Frank Calderoni is taking the company public.
- Anaplan, an
enterprise cloud software company, has filed to go public after 12 years. It was last valued at $1.4 billion. - Just a week ago, one David Morton came aboard as Anaplan CFO. Morton was previously at Tesla, but quit after about a month on the job.
- Anaplan is not profitable, but its revenues are growing steadily.
The enterprise software company Anaplan has filed to go public, just one week after poaching David Morton, its new CFO, from Tesla.
Morton was chief accounting officer at Tesla for just a month - an eventful month, in fact, during which Tesla CEO Elon Musk infamously said on Twitter that he had "funding secured" to take the car-maker private.
"Since I joined Tesla on August 6th, the level of public attention placed on the company, as well as the pace within the company, have exceeded my expectations," Morton said in comments revealed last week in a regulatory filing.
Things will likely be at least a little less dramatic at Anaplan, a 12-year-old company that sells sells connected planning software, a category of cloud software that helps companies manage their finances, sales and workforce.
Anaplan continues to grow steadily. Revenues were up 39.8% to $168 million in fiscal 2018, from $120 million 2017. Its number of users has also grown steadily, from 434 in January 2016 to 979 in July 2018. However, the company is still not profitable. The company lost $47.5 million in 2018 and $40 million in 2017.
There may be some turbulence, though, from the fact that much of its executive team is new to the company, according to its S-1 filing. CEO Frank Calderoni joined in January 2017, and Chief Revenue Officer Steven Birdsall joined in Feburary 2018. Anaplan's chief people officer, chief marketing officer and chief account officer all also joined within the last year.
"These members of management are critical to our vision, strategic direction, culture, and overall business success. Because of these recent changes, our senior management team, including members of our financial and accounting staff, has not worked at the company for an extended period of time and may not be able to work together effectively to execute our business objectives," the company warned in its filing.
But as a cloud software company, Anaplan's revenues are predictable and steady. Companies in its category have soared on the public markets in recent years, and more recently public software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like DocuSign have seen solid, steady performance on the public markets.
The startup, which will list under the ticker "PLAN," was last valued at $1.4 billion in a November 2017 funding round led by Premji Invest.
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