Pretty incredible if true - from the article, revenue was at 700 million with around 300 million EBITDA. That's a 14x multiple on ARR, which seems to be on the high side?
Though a lot of these acquisition/sale strategies seem to be leaking info to the media in order to publicly plant a marker in the ground ("anchoring" in persuasion/negotiation).
> That's a 14x multiple on ARR, which seems to be on the high side?
For small private companies, yes. Mailchimp is not in that set. Better comps likely to be public SaaS companies, since Mailchimp is certainly large enough to trade on the Nasdaq.
I anchor valuation around Snowflake on the high end (117x sales), but a lot of it is really about growth rate. Here are price/sales for some other public SaaS companies:
HubSpot: 29x
DocuSign: 36x
Asana: 47x
Atlassian: 40x
DataDog: 50x
Shopify: 49x
Twilio: 28x
Okta: 40x
Workday: 13x
A case could be made that a buyer could spiff up the Mailchimp app/company and prep for an IPO in the ~$30B range in a couple of years.
Thanks for sharing that. Looking at Shopify[0], their revenue growth rate has been between 50% to 100% (!!) per year - didn't look at the rest but what you say makes sense with that information.
Though a lot of these acquisition/sale strategies seem to be leaking info to the media in order to publicly plant a marker in the ground ("anchoring" in persuasion/negotiation).