Notes from the Marin Software IPO Filing

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?