Content Delivery Network Fastly Files for IPO Amid Growing Revenue
Fastly, a major content delivery network serving clients like The New York Times and Stripe, files for a public offering to raise up to one billion dollars.
Fastly, an eight-year-old content delivery network that previously raises $219 million in venture funding, officially files for an initial public offering. The company helps major media outlets like The New York Times and e-commerce platforms like Stripe and Ticketmaster deliver web content to browsers with incredibly fast load times of 20 to 30 milliseconds by caching data on its global network of servers.
The public filing lists a placeholder amount of $100 million, but analysts expect the company to seek closer to $1 billion when it prices its shares. Fastly reports $145 million in revenue for 2018, which represents an increase from $105 million in 2017, while its net losses shrink slightly from $31 million to $29 million during the same timeframe.
Despite rising costs of revenue, Fastly shows strong customer retention with a dollar-based net expansion rate of 132 percent in 2018. This successful public listing attempt makes Fastly a potential market bellwether for similar tech businesses like Cloudflare, although the company faces ongoing competition from both new and legacy vendors in the content delivery space.