Notes from the Coupa S-1 IPO Filing

Coupa, a SaaS spend management platform, just published their S-1 IPO filing to go public. Seeing the filing makes me sentimental as I first learned about them in 2009 when they become one of our early Pardot customers and we were at similar stages with our respective startups. Now, with over $100 million in recurring revenue and a strong growth rate, Coupa is positioned for a solid IPO.

Here are a few notes from the Coupa S-1 IPO filing:

• Mission – Our mission is to deliver “Value as a Service” by helping our customers maximize their spend under management, achieve significant cost savings and drive profitability. (pg. 1)
• 460 customers, 1.5 million users, and 2 million suppliers (pg. 1)
• We refer to the process companies use to purchase goods and services as spend management (pg. 1)
• Revenues and net losses: (pg. 2)
  • Revenues
    • 2014 – $50.8 million
    • 2015 – $83.7 million
    • 1H 2016 – $60.3 million ($120.6 million annualized divided by 460 customers makes for an average of $262,000/customer/year)
  • Net losses
    • 2014 – $27.3 million
    • 2015 – $46.2 million
    • 1H 2016 – $24.3 million
• Competitive strengths: (pg. 7)
  • Easy and Intuitive User Interface that Enables Widespread Employee Adoption.
  • Unified Platform With Powerful Functionality.
  • Independence and Interoperability.
  • Powerful Network Effects.
  • Cloud Platform.
  • Rich Partner Ecosystem.
  • Results-Driven Culture.
  • Higher Supplier Adoption.
  • Proprietary Data Enables Superior Insights.
•  Accumulated deficit of $147.2 million at July 31, 2016 (pg. 16)
• In general, the upfront costs associated with new customers are higher in the first year than the aggregate revenues we recognize from those new customers in the first year. (pg. 19)
• We have funded our operations since inception primarily through equity financings and prepayments by customers. (pg. 30)
• Equity (pg. 121)
  • CEO/Chairman (non-founder): 5.8%
  • VCs – 59%
  • Mutual Funds – 5.1%

Congrats to the Coupa team on building a meaningful, fast-growing SaaS company. My guess is that Coupa has a strong IPO and gets acquired by someone like Salesforce.com, Oracle, or Microsoft in the next 24 months as they look to expand their SaaS portfolio.