Marin Software just filed their S-1 (SEC doc) to go public and sell $75mm worth of shares. Marin makes an advertising and pay-per-click (PPC) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management platform for online marketing, or Revenue Acquisition Management, as they put it. I remember first hearing about Marin several years ago when the PPC bid management world was heating up, so it’s great to see how far they’ve come.
Here are a few notes from the Marin Software IPO filing:
- Platform works with Baidu, Bing, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and more (pg. 1)
- Revenues (pg. 2):
2009 – $7.5mm
2010 – $19mm
2011 – $36.1mm
2012 first 9 months – $42.5mm - Business benefits (pg. 3)
Financial lift
Efficiences and time savings
Better business decision making - Key strengths (pg. 3)
Robust and flexible integration
Big data analytics
Real-time, cross-publisher campaign management
Predictive bid management and optimization
Intuitive interface offering visibility and control
Experienced team committed to customer success
Highly-scalable and extensible cloud-based architecture - Losses (pg. 8)
2009 – $9.7mm
2010 – $11.9mm
2011 – $17.4mm
2012 first 9 months – $19.2mm - Accumulated deficit – $70.1mm (pg. 11)
- Fees are calculated as a percentage of customers’ advertising spend managed on the platform (pg. 12)
- Substantial majority of spend is through Google using the Google AdWords API (pg. 12)
- Sales cycle is typically one to nine months (pg. 15)
- Employee count (pg. 23)
2011 – 285
2012 – 386 - 181 day lock-up period for shareholders (pg. 31)
- 26% of total revenue came from advertisers outside the U.S. (pg. 44)
- 502 active customers on September 20, 2012 (pg. 45)
- 58% 2012 gross margin (pg. 49)
- Total amount raised from investors: $105.7mm (pg. 56)
- Equity ownership percentages (pg. 114)
Benchmark Capital – 16.4%
DAG Ventures – 16.1%
Temasek Capital – 10.1%
Focus Ventures – 6.5%
Crosslink Ventures – 5.8%
Founder – 8.8%
Co-founder – 2.8%
Co-founder – 3%
Marin Software looks to have the makings of a successful IPO based on being a modern SaaS platform growing incredibly fast at scale.
What else? What are some other thoughts on the Marin Software IPO filing?
David Cummings on Startups 
What’s the push for IPO? Drying up? Adjusted EBITDA was $23,300,000 last year vs $18,700,000 the prior year.
The push is a growth story. Internet advertising is a growing industry and will be even stronger with a decent REAL economic recovery.
The fact that they’ve burned through 20 million in the first 9 months of 2012 is another, pretty good reason.