Digital media measurement and analytics platform DoubleVerify has filed to go public.
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The company, which is based in New York, helps brands and agencies, marketplaces, and publishers analyze data and measure impact of media and advertising. The company counts more than 1,000 advertisers and partners on its platform, with more than 3.2 trillion transactions measured in 2020, according to the S-1. It competes with companies like Improvely, Integral Ad Science and Forensiq in the analytics and ad fraud detection space.
DoubleVerify was founded in 2008 and raised funding from investors including Blumberg Capital and IVP. Providence Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in DoubleVerify in 2017, and the company most recently raised a $350 million private equity round led by Tiger Global Management in October 2020.
Now, it appears the company and its stakeholders are looking to take advantage of the hot IPO market by taking DoubleVerify public. Providence Equity Partners, Blumberg Capital and Tiger Global Management are the largest stakeholders in the company.
Digital advertising has been on the rise over the years, and during the COVID-19 pandemic pretty much everything turned to digital. Despite the pandemic, DoubleVerify wrote in the S-1 that the company hadn’t “experienced a material increase in customers’ cancellations, or requests for more favorable contractual terms, or concessions.”
The company reported $243.9 million in revenue in 2020, up 34 percent from the $187.2 million in revenue it generated in 2019.
Still, DoubleVerify’s revenue is largely dependent on the demand of advertisers (about 91 percent of its 2020 revenue came from advertiser customers), and that could fluctuate depending on how long the pandemic-induced market disruptions last.
“While the impact on our business of the pandemic has been limited to date, our revenues are dependent on advertiser demand,” the company wrote. “The pandemic has resulted in market disruptions and a global economic slowdown, which has materially impacted demand for a broad variety of goods and services, and is also disrupting sales channels and marketing activities. To the extent that demand for digital advertising declines, our results of operations and financial condition may be materially impacted. The duration of such disruptions is highly uncertain and cannot be predicted.”
DoubleVerify is going public during a busy time for the public markets in general. Both venture-backed tech companies and those who had previously been acquired are going public at a time when the public markets have been generally enthusiastic to IPOs. Venture-backed companies that have filed to go public recently include Coinbase, Compass, ThredUp and DigitalOcean. Other companies in the IPO pipeline include Cricut and Frontier Airlines.
In addition to the companies going public through IPOs and direct listings, many are also opting to go public through SPACs. Most recently, real estate tech startup OfferPad announced it would go public through a SPAC.
DoubleVerify has applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DV. Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets, and J.P. Morgan are among the underwriters of the IPO.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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