Tom Siebel-Founded AI Start-Up C3.ai Files For Public Offering

C3.ai, a start-up established by Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel, has filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company, founded in 2009, said the size of the offering and the number of shares to be offered have yet to be determined.

C3 was last valued at $3.3 billion (£2.5bn), but the offering could value the firm at significantly higher than that, according to a Reuters report in early October about the company’s preparations to go public.

The plans come at a time of high investor demand for new tech stocks, with Palantir Technologies, Snowflake and Unity amongst the new offerings in recent weeks.

Predictive analytics

C3 builds predictive analytics systems that help customers with maintenance and repair work, fraud detection, money laundering prevention and other services.

Its customers include Royal Dutch Shell, the US Air Force, the US Department of Defence and 3M, with its board members including former US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice and Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell.

In October C3 formed a partnership with Microsoft and Adobe to develop a new customer relationship management (CRM) software platform to compete with Salesforce.com.

Siebel was recruited to Oracle in 1983 before founding enterprise CRM company Siebel Systems in 1993.

Oracle bought Siebel Systems in 2006, after which Siebel founded C3.

Enterprise AI

“Our singular focus is to leverage our technology leadership, first-mover advantage and management leadership to establish and maintain a global leadership position in Enterprise AI,” Siebel said in a statement.

“Should we succeed at that objective, we will have built C3.ai into one of the world’s great software companies.”

The company claims to be carrying out 1.1 billion predictions per day for its clients.

Siebel and private equity firm TPG are C3’s biggest owners, according to its prospectus.

The company reported a net loss of $69m for the year ended 30 April, compared to $33m the previous year, with revenue rising about 71 percent over the same period.

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America are leading the offering.  C3 is planning to list under the symbol AI.