For the second time this week, a Seattle technology company has filed to go public. This time it is Impinj, the maker of radio frequency identification technologies. The company said in a filing today with the SEC that it plans to raise up to $100 million through the offering. The filing comes just a few days after Zillow.com — the Seattle online real estate company — announced its intentions to raise $51 million.
Impinj is about the same size as Zillow, at least in terms of revenue. Last year, the company posted revenue of $31 million. That was up from $20 million in 2009.
And Impinj, liked Zillow, still is losing money on an annual basis. The company has never turned a profit, and showed a net loss of $11 million last year.
Impinj’s RFID tags are used by companies such as Walmart and Banana Republic for apparel inventory management and by Coca-Cola for product authentication in beverage dispensers. A number of governments also have mandated that RFID tags like the ones produced by Impinj be used in automobiles, pharmaceuticals and liquor.
From 2009 to 2010, the company said that sales of its Monza UHF Gen2 tag increased by 279 percent. Last year alone, the company sold 940 million tags. The company writes in its filing:
We envision a future when a broad array of everyday items is linked to networked information systems, thereby enabling significantly improved visibility, understanding and analysis of those items’ location and attributes. This global network of connected objects is often referred to as the “Internet of Things.” We believe that UHF Gen2 technology, powered by Impinj, is helping to make that vision a reality.
As we previously reported, it has been a long drought in the Seattle area for high-tech IPOs. The last company to actually complete an IPO was Motricity, the Bellevue mobile software company which went public last summer. But the market has started to turn, and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are feeling a bit more bullish on things.
It will be interesting to see how both Zillow and Impinj perform or if they actually make it out given their histories of losses.
Impinj was founded in 2000, and since that time it has raised bucket loads of cash from venture capitalists. The company’s largest shareholder include Arch Venture Partners (14 percent); Polaris Venture Partners (14 percent); Madrona Venture Group (13 percent); and Mobius Venture Capital (10 percent); Intel (six percent).
The company is led by former Broadcom executive William Colleran, while technology operations are led by associate University of Washington computer science professor Chris Diorio.
You can browse the full filing here.
