Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta at the company's HQ in Bellevue
Apptio CEO Sunny Gupta at the company’s HQ in Bellevue

Another Seattle area technology company is looking to test the IPO waters.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Apptio, which makes software to help CIOs better manage their IT departments, today filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise cash through the public markets, with plans to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol APTI. The Sunny Gupta-led company did not specify how many shares it plans to sell, or the total offering amount, details that likely will be released soon.

apptio3However, the IPO filing offers the very first glimpse into the economic performance of the 9-year-old company.

Apptio finished 2015 with $129.3 million in revenue, a 21 percent increase over the 2014 totals of $106.6 million. It also said that 40 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use its products.

Even though revenues have topped $100 million for the past two years, losses also are growing, and the company has yet to turn a profit. In 2015, Apptio showed a net loss of $41 million, which compared to a net loss of $32.9 million in 2014.

The company said the losses have increased as “we focused on growing our business.” To date, it has rung up an accumulated deficit of $183.7 million, and the company said its revenue growth rate will decline and losses will continue “for the foreseeable future.”

When Gupta founded Apptio in 2007, the entrepreneur said he was going to swing for the fences in an attempt to build the next big enterprise software company in Seattle. He’s never been shy about his desires to take Apptio public, so the only thing really surprising about the announcement today is that it took this long. There have been hints that Apptio has been positioning for an IPO for at least two years, and it has created a constant stream of buzz as a possible IPO candidate.

Apptio is headed into some choppy and unknowing IPO waters, and the filing comes after a news report earlier this year noted that T. Rowe Price — one of the company’s backers — had marked down its stake in the company.

So far this year, just 59 companies have priced shares in the U.S, down from 131 at this time last year, according to Renaissance Capital.

Even so, Apptio says the market it is attacking — which it dubs Technology Business Management or TBM —  is big, and “unpenetrated.” Citing stats from Gartner, it pegs the market at $2.7 trillion. Competitors include VMware and ServiceNow, which Apptio said in today’s filing “have greater name recognition, much longer operating histories, more and better-established customer relationships, larger sales forces, larger marketing and software development budgets and significantly greater resources than we do.”

But Apptio thinks it has found a unique way to attract large IT organizations.

“We provide the business system of record used by our customers’ IT organizations to analyze, optimize and plan investments, and benchmark their financial and operational performance against peers,” the company writes in the SEC filing. “Our TBM solutions consist of a powerful, cloud-based platform and a suite of SaaS applications that empower IT leaders to understand, communicate and transform IT to drive greater value from technology investments.”

If Apptio goes public, it would be the second technology company from the Seattle area to do so this year, following in the footsteps of RFID software and chip maker Impinj. Founded 16 years ago, Impinj went public at $14 per share last month, and it is now trading at just over $20 per share with a market value of $348 million.

Like Impinj, Apptio also is backed by Seattle venture capital firm Madrona, which owns a 16.6 percent stake in the company.

The 46-year-old Gupta, who previously sold iConclude to Opsware, continues to hold 18.7 percent of the company, while Silicon Valley venture capital firm Greylock holds 16.5 percent.

Apptio employed 694 people as of June 30, 2016, up from 628 during the same period last year.

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