Business Insider

Three days after Dropbox's killer IPO, the $852 million startup Smartsheet has filed to go public

Mark Mader, Smartsheet
Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader Smartsheet
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  • Smartsheet, a $852.1 million collaboration software company, has filed to go public.
  • Smartsheet, which was founded in 2005, grew its revenue by 66% from 2017 to 2018, but also saw its losses grow by a whopping 223% in the same period.
  • It's the latest enterprise tech company to move toward a public offering in 2018, in what has already turned out to be a busy year for IPOs.


Three days after Dropbox's successful IPO, another software company has filed to go public. 

Smartsheet —one of the Seattle area's most prominent business software startups — filed its S-1 on Monday. The company will go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "SMAR," in an offering managed by Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities and Jefferies. 

Smartsheet, which was founded in 2005, hasn't set a share price yet, but the company was last valued at $852.1 million in a May 2017 funding round, according to PitchBook.

Smartsheet had raised a total of $120 million in venture capital across 10 funding rounds since it was funded in 2005. Early rounds were led by Madrona Venture Group, with Insight Venture Management and Sutter Hill leading later rounds. It's unclear exactly when the company will start trading publicly. 

The company now has $111 million in annual revenue, according to the S-1 filing, and most of that is from software subscriptions. Though revenue grew by 66% from 2017 to 2018, its losses grew by a whopping 223% in the same period. Smartsheet lost $49 million in 2018, up from $15 million in 2017.

In fact, the company has lost money every quarter since it launched in 2005, according to the S-1. Most of these costs come from product development and customer acquisition, according to the company, which said in the S-1 that it expects "losses to continue for the foreseeable future."

Smartsheet's S-1 is the latest in a deluge of smaller enterprise tech companies turning to Wall Street this month — most of which have subsisted on venture funding for a decade or more. 

On Friday, Dropbox took its shares public on the NASDAQ in the first big tech offering of 2018, and is now valued around $12 billion. 

The $2.8 billion software company Pivotal filed for its IPO on Friday as well. And the $738 million 'subscription economy' company Zuora filed to go public on March 16, the same day that the $3.5 billion security company Zscaler raised $192 million in an IPO. The $3 billion electronic signature company DocuSign also reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO on March 20. 

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Becky Peterson was formerly a tech features correspondent focused on long-form profiles and investigations into the most interesting people and companies at the intersection of technology and finance.She's broken news on major tech stories including Palantir's work on Project Maven, Peter Thiel's $18 million estate in Miami (which was once featured on MTV's 'The Real World'), Jeffrey Epstein's tour of SpaceX, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's insistence that employees take "the D."Previously, she covered enterprise tech and tech investment banking with a focus on M&A, IPO and venture capital deals in San Francisco. She graduated from New York University with a master's degree in media, culture and communication with an emphasis on technology and society. ExpertiseSilicon Valley, Venture Capital, Investment Banking, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine MaxwellPopular articlesInside the turmoil at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where employees say divorce, Epstein, and vaccines have left some staffers polishing their résumésThe secret life of Ian Osborne, the shadowy 38-year-old cofounder of Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC who has built the ultimate black book of billionairesSilicon Valley VCs are at war with the 'far left radicals' running CaliforniaInside the life of Ghislaine Maxwell's secret husband, a once-high-flying tech entrepreneur backed by Eric Schmidt who is now a central figure in one of the country's most high-profile legal casesRent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman, one of the most successful female founders, is fighting to save her companyJeffrey Epstein set Elon Musk's brother up with a girlfriend in effort to get close to the Tesla founder, sources sayA drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.