Cloudflare Inc. today filed to go public, becoming the second tech firm after WeWork Cos. to do so since the start of the week.

San Francisco-based Cloudflare wrapped up the six months ended June 30 with a $129.2 million revenue haul, a 48% improvement over the prior-year period. The company achieved a 51% compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2018. More than 74,000 paying customers are now using Cloudflare’s content delivery network, which speeds up websites’ loading times and acts as a buffer against distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The company counts about a tenth of the Fortune 1000 among those paying customers. When factoring in Cloudflare’s free users, the installed base becomes much larger: The company’s platform supports roughly 10% of the world’s top million websites and more than 20 million internet properties overall. These also include other digital assets besides websites such as domains, application programming interfaces and mobile apps.

Cloudflare has expanded its addressable market in recent years with new services. One of the latest additions is Warp, a virtual private network launched this year that aims to help mobile users browse the web more securely.

In typical fashion for a rapidly growing tech firm, Cloudflare is unprofitable. The company generated a $36.8 million net loss in the first six months of 2019 compared with $32.5 million the same time last year. That represents a 13% bigger loss on 48%  higher revenue, which suggests is getting closer to climbing out of the red. 

However, profitability is not necessarily Cloudflare’s first priority. “A significant part of our business strategy is to focus on long-term growth,” the company stated in its initial public offering filing. “As a result, we may continue to operate at a loss or our profitability may be lower than it would be if our strategy were to maximize short-term profitability.”

Cloudflare will go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “NET.” The filing lists the fundraising target for the IPO as $100 million, a figure that companies normally use as a placeholder while they hammer out the final terms.

Sources told Business Insider last month that Cloudflare plans to hit the stock market in September. The company reportedly received a $3.2 billion valuation after its most recent funding round and has taken in a total of $332 million from investors to date.

Fastly Inc., a competing content delivery provider that is also unprofitable, raised $180 million in its NYSE debut earlier this year. The company’s shares gained as much as 58% on their first day of trading but have since dropped to below their IPO opening price. Given its own history of losses, Cloudflare will have to convince Wall Street that it can continue delivering strong growth despite the competition from Fastly and other players such as Akamai Technologies Inc.

Photo: Cloudflare