AlienVault Eyes Up IPO As Growth Spurt Continues

Like many other companies riding the cyber security wave, threat detection and response firm AlienVault is enjoying something of a growth spurt at the moment.

The California-based firm now boasts over 6,000 customers and the numbers are still going up. Around 600 new customers are being added every quarter and the goal is to reach 8,500 by the end of the year.

Revenues are also up 55 percent year-on-year and, in light of this strong performance, AlienVault CEO Barmak Meftah has revealed that an IPO is definitely on the horizon.

IPO-ready

Speaking to Silicon at InfoSecurity Europe 2017 in London last week, Meftah said that although there is currently no firm timeframe in place, steps are being taking to get the company ready to go public.

“The executive bench is full and I’m not going anywhere so sometime in the future, hopefully not too far in the future, we’re thinking about an IPO,” he said. “It’s gone from pursuing it in the background to being semi-active.

“When you grow at that pace it comes at you fairly quickly and there’s a balance of, you don’t want to go out too soon but you also don’t want to wait too long because you want to hit the right scale. So I can’t really commit to a date other than to say we’re definitely putting the foundational blocks in place.”

Meftah outlined how he has been busy hiring “IP-ready execs”, most notably in the form of Verisign’s former CFO, who has taken two companies public in his career and has been at AlienVault for 18 months.

He has since been joined by a head of field operations who was formerly at Zendesk, which has a similar go-to-market strategy and target market as AlienVault.

Meftah also explained that, rather than depending on the condition of the company itself, the timing of any IPO will more likely be driven by the health of equity capital markets, which is currently full of businesses waiting to come out the other side.

“If you look at our financials and scale, soon we’ll be in the range of an IPO so at that time we really have to take a look at the health of the equity capital markets because a lot depends on, not necessarily you as a company, but if the capital markets are good.

“Every indication I get from investment bankers is that there’s a big IPO funnel, which is actually going to be very healthy because a lot of companies have waited in this funnel for a while. So the hypothesis is that during the second half of this year there’s going to be a lot of companies that are going to pop out.

“So ideally we want to see five or six tech companies go out there and see how they do. So we’ll follow that and see how it goes.”

Current trends suggest that AlienVault won’t have anything to worry about. Demand for cyber security products and services is higher than ever and, as cyber threat continue to emerge at a rapid rate, the wave won’t be disappearing any time soon.

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