How do you value technology businesses with no revenue but great tech?
Consider a couple of recent events:
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[Fundraising example] Unspecified open-source database raises a Series C @ ~$500mm; typically database lifecycle is 10 years, company is about 5 years in and finishing up most of the actual "tech building" and now is "company building" beyond engineers plus bare bones S&M / G&A
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[M&A example] Snowflake pays $800mm earlier this year to acquire Streamlit to help build their catalog of data applications; company has <$100k in revenue and will contribute $25mm in costs according to most recent earnings call
In these transactions, how do you value these businesses if their is neither an EBITDA or Revenue multiple to go off of?
I have not read anything about Snowflake and Streamlit, but for acquiring companies with minimal revenue but a strong tech platform, we often look at the synergy opportunities. Maybe right now, our target is doing 100K in revenue, but if we believe that it can increase combined sales by $100M over the next years because it's a strong tech plug and play acquisition, we can value it that way. We also look at defensive plays - if we do not acquire this company and our competitors develop these capabilities with their own acquisitions or organic development, what market share may we lose? What is the value at risk?
Awesome. Super helpful. Thank you.
Just to add to this, there's two other methods of which I'm aware:
1) For something like your first example where there are active customers that aren't being monetized, you can do a comparable analysis except with users instead of financial metrics (e.g. this peer trades at X multiple of TEV/MAUs)
2) For strategic acquisitions, we often look at cost to build the product in-house... it would take X engineers Y years and they would cost Z dollars per annum. You can just multiply all that and add a premium for the fact that you get the product immediately instead of Y years later.
Also super helpful. Thank you for adding on.
A milestones approach is what I've seen for early medical device companies (for example). It's a lot more qualitative but a lot of these companies don't even have a product yet.
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