Fastly, edge cloud platform, files for IPO

Last week, Fastly Inc., a provider of an edge cloud platform announced that it has filed its proposed initial public offering (ipo) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Last year in July, in its last round of financing before a public offering, the company raised $40 million investment.

The book-running managers for the proposed offering are BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse. William Blair, Raymond James, Baird, Oppenheimer & Co., Stifel, Craig-Hallum Capital Group and D.A. Davidson & Co. are co-managers for the proposed offering.

Founded by Artur Bergman in 2011, Fastly is an American cloud computing services provider. Its edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services. The edge cloud platform is designed from the ground up to be programmable and to support agile software development. This programmable edge cloud platform gives developers real-time visibility and control by stream logging data. So, developers are able to instantly see the impact of new code in production, troubleshoot issues as they occur, and rapidly identify suspicious traffic. Fastly boasts of catering to customers like The New York Times, Reddit, GitHub, Stripe, Ticketmaster and Pinterest.

The company, in the unfinished prospectus shared how it has grown over the years, the risks of investing in the company, what are its plans for the future, and more. The company shows a steady growth in its revenue, while in December 2017 it was $104.9 million, it increased to $144.6 million, by the end of 2018. Its loss has also shown some decline from $32.5 million in December 2017 to $30.9 million in December 2018.

Predicting its future market value, the prospectus says, “When incorporating these additional offerings, we estimate a total market opportunity of approximately $18.0 billion in 2019, based on expected growth from 2017, to $35.8 billion in 2022, growing with an expected CAGR of 25.6%.“

Fastly has not yet determined the number of shares to offered and the price range for the proposed offering. Currently, the company’s public filing has a placeholder amount of $100 million. However, looking at the amount of funding the company has received, TechCrunch predicts that it is more likely to get closer to $1 billion when it finally prices its shares.

Fastly has two classes of authorized common stock: Class A and Class B. The rights of both the common stockholders are identical, except with respect to voting and conversion. Each Class A share is entitled to one vote per share and each Class B share is entitled to 10 votes per share. Class B shares are convertible into one shares of Class A common stock. The Class A common stock will be listed on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FSLY.”

To read more in detail, check out the ipo filing by Fastly.