Less than two years after becoming a unicorn, Sumo Logic Inc. today filed for an initial public offering, revealing rapid revenue growth and a recent increase in losses as well. 

Redwood City, California-based Sumo Logic provides a cloud analytics platform that information technology teams use to look for infrastructure issues and cybersecurity threats. The platform’s data crunching features also lend themselves to more business-oriented use cases such as customer analytics. 

Sumo Logic noted in today’s IPO filing that “we face intense competition” from other IT analytics providers such as Elastic NV. Nevertheless, the company managed to grow revenues in its most recent fiscal year by about 50%, to $155.1 million. Sumo Logic’s momentum carried over into the first quarter of 2020 and boosted sales to $47.2 million from $32.5 million a year ago.

In the same three-month period, Sumo Logic recorded losses of $23.6 million versus $15.3 million the same time in 2019. The company closed the preceding fiscal year $92.1 million in the red. 

The analytics provider hopes Wall Street will be willing to overlook those losses in light of its strong growth and large market opportunity. In the IPO filing, Sumo Logic cited an internal estimate that puts its addressable market at about $49.3 billion. However, the company cautioned that the competition over this market is intensifying, noting how it expects “competition to increase as other established and emerging companies enter this market.” 

Sumo Logic also provided an overview of how it plans to spend the IPO proceeds. “We have pursued acquisitions and investments in technologies to accelerate product innovation and market expansion and will continue to do so,” the filing states. In another section, Sumo Logic disclosed that “we intend to continue to invest significantly to grow our business in the near future rather than optimizing for profitability or cash flows.”

So far, Sumo Logic’s investments in growth has helped it build up a customer base of more than 2,100 organizations including Fortune 500 firms such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Netflix Inc.. The company claims that its analytics platform processes some 873 petabytes of data every day for clients. 

“[It’s] one platform that spans not just AWS but also GCP, Azure and 40% of the data we collect every day comes from on-prem,” Sumo Logic Chief Executive Officer Ramin Sayar (pictured) detailed on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE Studio in late 2018. “So we give them that single platform that spans everything they need.” 

Sumo Logic plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol “SUMO.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE