Meet The Next Hot Enterprise Tech IPO: FireEye Wants To Raise $175 million
FireEye plans to raise up to $175 million although it hasn't yet said how many shares it plans to offer, or the price range or the date.
In January, FireEye became an enterprise company to watch when it landed a $50 million round of financing and a $1.25 billion valuation. It had raised a total investment of $85.5 million.
At that time, CEO Dave DeWalt told us that the next stop was an IPO, probably later this year.
DeWalt had joined the company last November. He'd previously been the CEO of antivirus software maker McAfee, where he led the company through a turnaround to its acquisition by Intel for $7.6 billion.
DeWalt wasn't the only big name attracted to FireEye. Investors include Juniper Networks, Silicon Valley Bank and the the CIA's venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
That's because the company's tech solves a really hard security problem. It can detect two types of hacker attacks that are very difficult to stop: "zero day" attacks and "advanced persistent threats."
Zero-day attacks are ones where hackers use bugs the software vendor hasn't yet fixed. The vendor has had "zero days" to come up with a fix. APTs are when hackers use all means possible to break into a particular network.
FireEye's security "appliance"— a combination of hardware and software — finds these attacks by running the suspicious code or opening suspicious emails in a protected area to see what they do. The process takes a fraction of a second.
The company has more than doubled revenue in the first half of 2013 to $61.6 million, from $29.7 million in the first half of 2012. It posted a net loss of $67.2 million for the first half, compared to a loss of $14.3 million in the same period of 2012.