Mulesoft set to be first tech IPO of 2017? We'd forgotten they existed...

App integration software business Mulesoft is set to make its initial public offering after revealing its financials. Founded in 2006, the company has only now published its financial details as part of a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for going public. The San Francisco-headquartered …

[Anonymous Coward]

Same reason as always

Why it has decided to go public

Management needs a new delivery from Ferrari.

[Adam Trickett]

I've used it, it's okay

I've used it at work, it's okay but didn't solve any problems we had.

I can see the usefulness of it, but like all new tools it's over hyped and that does spoil it to some extent.

Good luck in cashing out for them... No ill feelings in their direction.

[Cuddles]

"pulled in $187.7m last year, up 170 per cent from its $110.3m in revenue in 2015."

Seems to be an extra 1 there, that's definitely not a 170% increase.

"Gross profits were just over $138m from $78m, and net losses decreased to a piddling $49.6m, down from $65.4m the year before."

Hmm, so revenue is up $77m, gross profit is up $50m, but overall losses have only decreased by $15m. That's not a particularly healthy looking trend, especially when losses of $50m on total revenue of less than $200m isn't exactly great in absolute terms either. That said, at least these guys seem to have an actual product to sell to an actual market, which puts them leagues ahead of most tech startups these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a bad product, but a little inconsistent

I've used the tool/platform quite a bit over the last couple of years, was being touted as the next big thing a while back in the company, so they decided to jump on the bandwagon for a while.

I quite like the IDE (although Eclipse based, so tech marmite), and the platform in general, especially the ease of set-up and flexibility of deployment compared to other platforms.

But it still feels very immature once you delve under the hood a bit, lots of inconsistencies, and things that sometimes work the opposite to what you'd expect. I suspect they probably changed their mind over the years about how things were going to work, so implemented newer features in a new better way, but left the older features as-is for backward compatibility, meaning sometimes related functions/features, work in completely different ways to each other!

As a simple example, Mule comes with a built in generic Error handling feature, which basically 'catches' errors in a flow. This works well most of the time, allowing for a generic global 'catch-all' and then override with specific error handling in an individual flow when needed. This would be fine, except that not all the functions and service you can drop into a flow, actually trigger the error handling, sometimes you need add 'code' to trap the errors manually, and then force the error processing to kick in!

[Anonymous Coward]

Small world!

Oddly I was just looking on their website earlier this morning (from the office), looking at a potential job change. I'm on the deck of the sinking ship CSC, hence the AC, and the water is most definitely neck high now, and rather chilly!

The first benefit listed under the jobs listing was Pre-IPO equity.

I'm guessing the 'Pre' might not be around for much longer.

[Alien8n]

Re: Small world!

From experience post-IPO equity is pretty much worthless unless the company actually breaks even.

Anyone who was at the optical semiconductor firm I worked at prior to their IPO made a fortune. Those that joined shortly afterwards saw share options rapidly decline. During the 3 years I held those options they were worthless as the share price on the open market never reached the option price.

That said pre-IPO equity may not be worth it nowadays either, depending on what lock-ins may be in place and whether the share prices rises or tanks on opening.