Domo
Domo founder and CEO Josh James
- After talking about an IPO for years, 2018 may actually be the year that $2 billion data-crunching startup Domo goes public.
- The company reportedly took the first step towards filing its IPO paperwork.
- Domo burst onto the scene in 2015 and was worth $2 billion before many people had heard of it.
- It is backed by heavy hitter investors like BlackRock, Greylock and Benchmark.
Domo, the $2.28 billion Utah-based startup that's been promising an IPO for years, may finally be making a move.
The company held its "organizational meeting" last week, which is a first step as a company files the IPO paperwork, Recode's Theodore Schleifer reported. A Domo spokesperson declined comment.
In 2015, Domo burst onto the scene with little warning. It hit a $2 billion valuation by 2016, before many people had even heard of it. People called it an "insta-unicorn," meaning that by the time the tech world was paying attention, investors had already poured enough money into it that it was valued at more than $1 billion.
Domo has raised nearly $730 million in venture funding all told, and was valued at $2.28 billion in 2017, after its latest $115 million round in December 2017. It is backed by some heavy hitters including BlackRock, Greylock and Benchmark. Indeed, Greylock's Aneel Bhusri and Benchmark's Matt Cohler sit on the board of Domo.
Domo offers cloud software for "business intelligence and analytics." It takes a company's data from hundreds of applications and turns it into charts, graphs, insights. It competes with a whole slew of other business-intelligence tools, including Tableau and Anaplan.
Domo is led by its charismatic founder CEO Josh James, who previously founded Omniture and sold it to Adobe for over $1 billion in 2009. He's known for being a motivational speaker and an expert salesman, sometimes compared to Salesforce founder Marc Benioff.
However, in 2016, Domo insiders told Business Insider that some of the company's offerings were still somewhat immature at that point, and that the company tended toward hype, as many startups often do.
James has been talking about this IPO since 2015. But the time may be finally be right. 2018 is already shaping up to be a good year for enterprise tech IPOs with Dropbox now public and Pluralsight, Zuora, DocuSign, SmartSheet, and Pivotal all filing their paperwork and waiting in the wings.