UPDATED 15:35 EDT / AUGUST 26 2016

NEWS

IT financial software maker Apptio tests initial public offering waters

Apptio Inc., a Bellevue, WA-based developer of software that helps executives make informed financial decisions, apparently liked what it saw from the latest round of earnings from newly public tech companies this quarter. It filed to go public today with a goal of raising up $75 million.

Apptio lost $41 million on $129 million in revenue in 2015, according to its S-1 statement. Both numbers grew from the previous year, when Apptio had sales of $106.6 million and losses of $32.9 million. It said losses can be expected to continue “for the foreseeable future” and that growth rates can be expected to slow.

The nine-year-old company sells what it calls “technology business management” on a software-as-a-service basis. Its software gives chief information officers the same kind of tools to analyze, optimize and plan technology investments that their sales and finance peers have had for a long time. IT executives can also benchmark their financial and operational performance against their peers.

“We empower IT leaders to transform IT into a service provider, to navigate the cloud transition, and to shift technology resources to drive more business innovation,” the company said in its prospectus. “Our platform automatically aggregates, cleanses and establishes relationships across large amounts of customer data from disparate sources and maps the data into our standard IT operating model.” Apptio said its more than 300 customers include 40 percent of the Fortune 100 across a broad spectrum of industries and company sizes.

The company was co-founded by Sunny Gupta, a former senior executive at Opsware Inc. and iConclude Co., among other companies. IConclude was acquired in 2007 by Opsware, which shortly thereafter was acquired by Hewlett-Packard Co. Apptio has been making noise about going public for at least two years, according to GeekWire. Gupta has said he wants to build the next great Seattle-based tech company, after Microsoft and Amazon.

Those are lofty ambitions, but Gupta has shown resilience in the past. He told The New York Times that he earned a partial scholarship to the University of South Carolina and made ends meet by working odd jobs, including washing dishes and moving. He said he applied for – and got – a position as intern for the president of the university because “I told them I was like Avis – I just work harder than anybody else,” he said.

Apptio employed 694 people (pictured above) as of the end of June, up from 628 one year earlier. It has raised $136 million in five venture rounds, according to CrunchBase.

Co-founder and chief financial officer Kurt Shintaffer previously worked with Gupta at iConclude. The company has a seasoned management team, each with more than 20 years of experience in their roles.

Apptio is entering a public market that is still wary of investments in tech companies. Just 59 companies have priced shares this year, according to Renaissance Capital LLC. That’s down from 170 last year and 275 in 2014.

The offering is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs & Co, JP Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays PLC, Jefferies Group, Royal Bank of Canada, BMO Capital Markets Corp. and Pacific Crest Securities Inc.

Photo via Apptio Facebook page

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