Informatica filed to go public late last week, some six years after it was taken private by two private equity teams for $5.3 billion. The data-focused company used its passage through the private markets to execute a move to the cloud, work that came to a head in early 2021, when Informatica announced its dive into the lakehouse market, where Databricks plays today.
We’ll explore the company’s IPO filing to figure out just how strong of a cloud business it has managed to build and how winsome its overall economic profile appears. While the company has yet to set an initial IPO price range giving us an indicator of where it might be valued, there are media reports of a valuation as high as $10 billion.
A number that big demands exploration. Let’s get into the numbers.
Inside Informatica’s business
Turning back the clock to 2015, the final Informatica earnings release that we could find from its last run at being a public company is dated April 22, 2015. That was just days after the company’s takeover was announced, so the timing makes sense.
At the time, Informatica reported revenues of $250.5 million, up 3% from its year-ago comp. That revenue growth number was more than anemic, but did contain an interesting seed of good news, namely that “subscription revenues” at the company were up 47% on a year-over-year basis. Sure, every company wants you to focus more on its growth business than its overall performance, but the subscription result was pretty strong, even if it was from a modest base figure ($21.3 million).
And in that final period — the quarter ended March 31, 2015 — Informatica generated $32.2 million in operating income and $21.6 million worth of net income. At the time it went private, Informatica was profitable and slow-growing, albeit with a new business arm that was putting up pretty notable revenue expansion.
What happened over the last half-decade or so?