SailPoint IPO Filing Reveals Sales Growth, Improving Losses

SailPoint became the first pure-play cybersecurity company to pursue an initial public offering since 2021, revealing increased sales, improved losses and a heavy reliance on channel partners.

See Also: Core Elements of Modern Workforce Identity Security

The Austin, Texas-based identity security vendor said 80% of its new customer transactions in the fiscal year ended on Jan. 31, 2024, which involved technology partners, system integrators, value-added resellers or managed service providers. SailPoint will become just the second prominent cybersecurity firm to go public twice, following in the footsteps of McAfee, which was publicly traded from 1999 to 2011 and again from 2020 to 2022.

“Enterprises now recognize that taking an ‘inside-out’ or ‘identity-centric’ approach to enterprise security is critical,” Founder and CEO Mark McClain wrote in a letter to potential investors. “As a result of this new reality, we believe demand for identity security solutions has continued to build in the years since our first IPO.”

SailPoint intends to use some of its net proceeds from the IPO to repay a portion of its term loan owned by Thoma Bravo and the rest for general corporate purposes, including working capital, operating costs, capital expenditures and repaying debt, according to a filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company plans to be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SAIL (see: Why Thoma Bravo Is Considering Taking SailPoint Public Again).

Robust Growth, Reduced Losses

The firm first went public in 2017, raising $240 million on a $1 billion valuation, and was taken private by Thoma Bravo in 2022 for $6.9 billion – in what was then the sixth-largest cybersecurity deal of all time. SailPoint has 2,895 customers across the financial services, media, energy and utilities, technology, life sciences, and healthcare industries, with no organization accounting for more than 10% of revenue.

SailPoint experienced robust growth through the first nine months of 2024, according to its 214-page filing with the SEC late Friday. Its sales jumped to $621.5 million during that time span, up 25.1% from $496.9 million in the first nine months of 2023. And the company’s net loss improved to $235.7 million in the first nine months of 2024, 23.5% better than the $308.1 million net loss recording the year prior.

“When we founded SailPoint in 2005, our initial product offering was primarily focused on governance,” McClain wrote in the letter. “It wasn’t so much about protecting that access but understanding and managing and ‘governing’ that access. The predominant belief today is that not just managing but securing identities and their access to applications and data is critical to enterprise security.”

U.S. sales made up 68% of SailPoint’s revenue in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, with 19% of revenue coming from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 13% coming from the rest of the world. SailPoint said it plans to continue to invest in its sales and marketing efforts and channel partner networks to deepen its presence in existing geographies and expand into new geographies.

First Cybersecurity Pure-Play IPO Since 2021

SailPoint’s 2,645-person employee base is distributed across the globe, with 59% located in the United States, 19% located in Asia-Pacific, 14% located in Europe, the Middle East or Africa, and 8% located elsewhere in the Americas. The company said its main rivals are identity vendors such as CyberArk, Okta and One Identity and large public companies that offer identity products such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle (see: Facing the Complexity of Unified Identity, Third-Party Risk).

“We continue to attract the world’s most respected and well-known organizations as SailPoint customers,” McClain wrote in the letter. “We now count half of the Fortune 500 and 25% of the Forbes Global 2000 as customers who have chosen to put their trust in SailPoint to protect their organizations from identity-based threats.”

SailPoint’s IPO filing comes nine months after Silicon Valley-based data resilience startup Rubrik – whose offering spans data security as well as backup and disaster recovery – raised $752 million on a $6.6 billion valuation in a New York Stock Exchange public offering. The last pure-play cybersecurity IPO came in September 2021, when ForgeRock raised $275 million on a $2 billion valuation in a NYSE public offering.

The company has made three acquisitions under Thoma Bravo’s ownership, most recently scooping up Imprivata’s identity governance and administration unit in December 2024 for $10.7 million plus up to $7.4 million in earnouts. SailPoint also bought privileged access management vendor Osirium in October 2023 for $8.2 million and third-party identity risk provider SecZetta in January 2023 for $58.2 million (see: SailPoint Buys Imprivata IGA Assets to Boost Healthcare).

Of SailPoint’s 2,895 customers, 900 of them were recording more than $250,000 in annual recurring revenue – accounting for 76% of the company’s ARR as of Oct. 31, 2024, – while 140 customers generated more than $1 million in ARR, making up 32% of SailPoint’s ARR. The number of clients with at least $250,000 of ARR increased by 26%, and the number of customers with at least $1 million of ARR grew by 67%.