UPDATED 22:51 EDT / MAY 14 2019

Cybersecurity startup CrowdStrike is the latest money-losing unicorn to file for IPO

CrowdStrike Inc., a San Francisco Bay area-based cybersecurity startup, has filed for an initial public offering, another money-losing tech unicorn hoping it can raise more money in the market.

Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike offers endpoint protection, a form of cybersecurity that protects devices such as desktop personal computers, laptops and mobile devices. It does so through a cloud-based platform that’s claimed to stop breaches by detecting attacks, including malware-free intrusions.

CrowdStrike’s main offering, the Falcon security platform, has been designed to protect employee laptops and other endpoints connected to a company’s network that the company said analyzes more than 100 billion security events a day. Related services include Falcon Sensor, an agent that runs directly on endpoints and handles the execution of security tasks, and Falcon Prevent, an antivirus platform that uses artificial intelligence to catch malware.

While not a household name, CrowdStrike is arguably most famous for identifying alleged Russian government-linked groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee servers prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That data eventually ended up on WikiLeaks.

CrowdStrike is seeking to go public at a time where tech-related companies haven’t been well-received, particularly money-losing unicorns — this one valued at $3 billion as of its last round of funding in June.

According to the figures in its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, CrowdStrike had a net loss of $140 million on revenue of $249.8 million in the year ended Jan. 31.

Much of that loss was driven by attempts to sign up new customers, with CrowdStrike saying that its sales and marketing costs jumped 66% last year, to $172.7 million. The increased loss was attributed to an increasing headcount as well as a conference and other marketing events, according to CNBC.

CrowdStrike follows in the footsteps of Lyft Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc., which tanked on debut at nearly historical levels. Other tech companies, such as Zoom Video Communications Inc. and PagerDuty Inc., haven’t fared badly. Zoom, however, is profitable and PagerDuty predicted it would be profitable in short order. Slack Technologies Inc. is set to hit the New York Stock Exchange June 20, though via a direct-listing instead of an IPO.

The company has raised $481 million in venture capital. Investors include March Capital Partners, Accel, CapitalG, IVP, General Atlantic, InstantScale Ventures, CapitalG, Telstra Ventures, Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Warburg Pincus.

Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, at last year’s Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS Summit last summer in Washington D.C., about how the company views the market:

Image: CrowdStrike

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU