Carbon Black, the cybersecurity company based out of Waltham, MA has filed an S-1 document with the SEC. The company has indicated that it may raise up to $100 million in an IPO; however, that number may change if the company ends up going public as this is a typical placeholder figure. According to the filing, their ticker symbol would be CBLK to trade on the Nasdaq stock exchange. As of now, pricing terms were not discussed. Morgan Stanley and J.P Morgan are the joint book runners on this deal.
Founded in 2002, the company was named as Bit9. It changed its name in 2016 after acquiring Carbon Black and adopting the name of the acquired company. The company provides cloud-based endpoint security software that uses analytics to improve endpoint security for organizations.
As of today, Carbon Black has raised more than $191 million through investors. The company recorded $162 million in sales for 2017. This number was up from $116.2 million recorded in 2016 and $70.6 million in 2015. Despite these sales figures, the company reported a net loss of $55.8 million in 2017 compared to $44.5 million in 2016 and $38.65 million in 2015.
Carbon Black has been in the forefront as an IPO candidate for a long time now, however, the resolve to go public gained traction after the 2012 laws that permit smaller private companies to confidentially file IPO plans with the SEC. As of now, the public listing has not yet materialized.
In this filing, Carbon Black stated that its competitors are McAfee, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, Cisco Systems, Crowdstrike, and Cylance. The company’s biggest shareholders are Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, .406 Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley, according to this week’s SEC filing.
As of the end of 2017, Carbon Black had 932 full-time employees with the greater part of the staff based out of the US. The company management is headed by CEO Patrick Morley who has been with the organization since 2007.
