This week’s wave of big-ticket funding rounds just reached a new high point.

Little-known enterprise software giant Infor Corp. today announced that it has secured a hefty $1.5 billion in fresh capital from Koch Equity Development, the investment arm of Koch Industries Inc., and Golden Gate Capital. The company previously raised more than $2 billion from Koch in an early 2017 round.

Right before Infor’s announcement this morning, data management provider Veeam Software Inc. disclosed that it has landed a $500 million round. And the day before, Veeam competitor Rubrik Inc. reeled in $261 million from a consortium that included Bain Capital Ventures. The three investments represent a strong start to the quarter for the enterprise software market.

It’s an especially big landmark for Infor, which sells applications that help organizations manage back-office operations such as hiring and accounting. The company will use the new round as a springboard to a potential initial public offering.

In an investor call today, Infor Chief Executive Charles Phillips (pictured) said the software giant is considering whether to file for an IPO this year or next. Infor will use part of the new capital to boost its balance sheet ahead of the offering. Specifically, the company will reduce some of its $6 billion debt load by paying down about $1.25 billion in coming months.

Indeed, Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media’s co-CEO and chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, said that’s the key for Infor. “If they’re going to do an IPO, they need to clean up the balance sheet,” he said.

Infor already operates like a publicly traded firm in certain respects: It sells bonds on public markets and issues earnings reports.

“In some sense we have the worst of all worlds,” Phillips quipped during an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio late last year. “We have the discipline of being a public company and the scrutiny without the capital and the branding. Every bank on Wall Street is visiting us.”

Phillips also touched upon the considerations driving Infor’s IPO plans. “The upside is it [going public] would solve probably our biggest challenge, which is brand recognition, almost instantly because this would be a top 10 tech IPO,” he said.

Vellante, who called Infor “the world’s biggest least-known software company,” said the IPO would “give them the branding of a Fortune 1000 company” at last.

Infor’s financials make it clear why it’s expecting such a big stock market debut. The company closed 2018 with revenues of more than $3 billion and, according to Philips, 70 percent of new bookings now coming from its software-as-a-service products.

In recent years, Infor has executed a slow and continuing transition from selling traditional on-premises software licenses, including its core Lawson enterprise resource planning software, to cloud subscriptions. The company’s flagship CloudSuite lineup of enterprise resource planning solutions includes hundreds of applications aimed at a variety of industries. Infor builds industry vertical-specific solutions for each market it targets, rather than providing one customizable, one-size-fits-all platform as competitors do.

Infor’s portfolio also includes many other products. Among them is the GT Nexus supply chain management platform, an artificial intelligence assistant dubbed Coleman and the Birst business intelligence service, which the company obtained through a $100 million acquisition in 2017.

Here’s Phillips’ full interview on theCUBE:

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: SiliconANGLE