Liquidity

Adaptive Insights Sells Out Ahead Of Planned IPO

Morning Report: The Adaptive Insights IPO is off (not that we’re bitter whatsoever). Instead, the firm took a bigger check to join up with Workday. All together now: boo.

Consider my working calendar changed. Instead of going through with its own public offering, Adaptive Insights has opted for subsumption by Workday. Workday, worth more than $26.5 billion as of this morning, will pay around $1.55 billion for the smaller company.

(For more on what Adaptive Insights does, and how its business works, head here.)

The $1.55 billion price tag is a win for the startup’s investors as the firm was targeting a valuation of roughly half its sale price in its IPO, as Axios’ Dan Primack notes:

The price is $1.55 billion, which is more than double the $705 million fully-diluted value that Adaptive Insights would have fetched in the middle of its IPO range.

Yep.

Why did Adaptive Insights sell? Because it got a swell price, really. As we noted in our prior coverage, the company’s last fiscal year brought in total revenue of $106.5 million—nearly $94 million came from recurring sources. If the firm was shooting for a ~$700 million midpoint, it was hoping to debut worth, say, seven times trailing revenue. That number is in the realm of sanity for the current software startup market. At $1.55 billion, the company is exiting for fifteen times its last year’s revenue, a very good result.

And, for a company that only raised $176.3 million, according to Crunchbase, Adaptive Insights is nearly ten-bagging its external capital.

And thus ends our week’s IPO. Once more: boo.

iStockPhoto / Oksana Raievska

Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily.

Featured

CTA

Find the right companies, identify the right contacts, and connect with decision-makers with an all-in-one prospecting solution.

Copy link