Samsara IPO: IOT Date, Price, and Valuation, Explained

While there was a brief lull in U.S. IPO markets around Thanksgiving week, December is looking like another busy month. After HashiCorp and Nu Holdings, there are listings from Samsara and Bionomics. What’s the date and price for the Samsara IPO and what valuation is the company seeking?

While 2021 has been a record year for IPOs and there have been mega listings like Rivian, the price action of IPOs has disappointed. Many companies that went public through a SPAC merger also trade below the SPAC IPO price. However, despite the dismal performance of IPOs, there's still a strong appetite for new listings, especially in the tech industry.

Samsara is an IoT company in the industrial space. According to the company, it's “the pioneer of the Connected Operations Cloud, which allows businesses that depend on physical operations to harness IoT data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations.”

Samsara was featured as the second fastest-growing company on the Financial Times 2021 list of America’s fastest-growing companies. The list was topped by fintech company Upgrade. Samara was the 15th company on LinkedIn’s 2021 Top Startup List.

For three years, the company has been on the Forbes Cloud 100 list and its rank has gradually improved. After jumping 42 slots in 2020, it has jumped another six slots to reach 19 on the list in 2021.

Samsara is expected to IPO on Dec. 15. The stock will trade under the ticker symbol “IOT.”

Samsara has kept the IPO price range between $20 and $23 and intends to offer 35 million shares as part of the offering. The underwriters have an option to purchase an additional 5.25 million shares. Morgan Stanley, Allen & Co., Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are the lead underwriters for the offering.

At the top end of the IPO price, the company could raise around $925 million in gross proceeds, assuming that the underwriters exercise the option to buy additional shares.

Samsara is a fast-growing company. It reported revenues of $249.9 million in the fiscal year ended January 30, 2021, which was 108 percent higher than the same period in the previous fiscal year. In the first nine months of the current fiscal year, the company’s revenues rose 75 percent YoY to $302.6 million. It has surpassed last year’s revenues in the first nine months of the current fiscal year.

Like most other tech companies that have gone public over the last year, Samsara is also posting strong top-line growth and massive losses. However, the good news is that these losses are narrowing. It posted a net loss of $225.2 million in the fiscal year ended February 1, 2020, which was even higher than its revenues for the year.

The losses narrowed to $210.2 million in the next fiscal year even though the revenues doubled. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, Samsara's net loss has narrowed to $102.2 million—down from $174 million in the same quarter last year.

IOT is seeking a valuation of $11.6 billion in the IPO. Based on the revenues for the most recent fiscal year, we get a trailing price-to-sales multiple of 46x. While the multiples might seem high, growth names have been able to command such valuations.