UPDATED 23:00 EDT / JUNE 20 2016

NEWS

Twilio to offer 10m shares in IPO at $12-$14 per share

Cloud communications company Twilio, Inc. announced the terms of its forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) Monday.

The company said in a filing that it plans to offer 10 million shares priced between $12 and $14; according to Marketwatch at the top of that range, Twilio would raise up to $161 million, not including options granted to the underwriters to buy additional shares.

Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. are the lead underwriters for the float and are said to be interested in acquiring 1.5 million shares.

Talk of a Twilio IPO first emerged in February 2015 when Twilio investor Scott Raney of Redpoint Ventures said that the company is in a strong position financially and that it would prepare itself for an initial public offering by putting internal processes in place, but added at the time that there was no rush to go public.

Twilio subsequently raised $130 million Series E in the middle of the year (confirmed in July) on a valuation of $1.1 billion.

New rumors that the company was preparing to file its IPO paperwork emerged in December before the company filed its float paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) May 26.

The paperwork filed by Twilio indicated that for the calendar year 2015 the company had revenues of $166 million on a net loss of $35.5 million.

IPO redux

Twilio’s float comes after a slow six months for tech IPO’s with the exception of network equipment maker Acacia Communications Inc.’s successful float in May and Dell, Inc. spinoff SecureWork’s not so successful float in April.

Neither of those companies were the size of Twilio, and the company’s float is being seen by many as the first serious test of the market for larger startups looking to go public in 2016.

Fundamentally Twilio is a strong company, and while the fact it’s not profitable going into the float the losses are not huge, particularly compared to some of the tech companies that went public in 2015, and its underlying fundamentals, particularly 88 percent growth in 2015 versus the year before, should see it well regarded by investors.

Coming into the IPO Twilio has raised $233.7 million from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Bessemer Venture Partners, K9 Ventures, 500 Startups, Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, and others.

While a date for the actual IPO has not been formally set, it’s expected to float on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TWLO later this week.

Image credit: johndbritton/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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