Tintri files for US$100m IPO but warns losses will likely keep coming

Virtualized storage upstart Tintri has filed for its initial public offering. The filing reveals modest ambitions to raise around US$100m. Why the small sum? The filing reveals that the company keeps making losses: revenue of $49.8m, $86.0m and $125.1m in fiscal 2015, 2016 and 2017 respective saw net losses of $69.7m, $101.0m …

[John Smith 19]

TL:DR Revenue and losses getting bigger but losses getting bigger slower than revenue rising.

Whatever happened to companies making a profit before they had an IPO?

I can see two groups investing in this.

a) People who are very familiar with this market and can judge if this company really does have an edge over their (wide) range of competitors or

b)People who nothing but have the necessary amount of cash (quite large I think) need to take such a gamble.

Note that a) assumes they really do have some sort of "Special Sauce" (C Andrew Orlowski) that makes them better.

Since I am in neither group I won't be going anywhere near this.

[KronorWow]

I don't envy a storage array vendor IPO'ing in this market where storage arrays seem to be in decline, and being overtaken by newer technologies.

Storage arrays aren't dead by any stretch, but I think if you're a storage vendor today, you better have a damn good feature set and roadmap around CI/HCI, hybrid cloud, and containers. But even if you do all that, you're still up against storage pricing becoming more and more commoditized (which of course impacts revenue and margins), and lots of competition.

I'll wish them good luck, and hopefully they'll navigate these choppy storage waters and come out ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree, it is multi pronged competition. You have to beat all the old school array vendors, and the HCI vendors... and then the major public cloud players. A lot of people to beat to win a deal. Even if you win, probably going to be at lower margins as prices keep going down. Tintri's VM functionality is not all that unique anymore either as VMware has released VSAN... and most people are moving to containers in the public cloud or have aims to do so at some point.

[Anonymous Coward]

silent are the small players tintri, tegile, etc. the feature set battle and flash adoption wars of 1012-2015 are over. nobody cares. Cloud has won, HW vendors consolidated and now the upper echelon of brands rule the roost. Tintri - a vendor solving a problem that would have been cool back in 2008 versus NetApp or non NAS solutions...that started its business when its entire market share just reduced emphasis on dedicated NAS and either buys high volume/high discount from the likes of DellEMC or goes to cloud. Missed the boat is an understatement... hope they have a few solid loyal customers their local reps wine/dine to keep them afloat.

[baspax]

Spot on. More likely they'll close shop soon. The big cash crunch is coming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Desperate exit

The rumor in valley is that it's a desperate exit for investors, although it's too late already. You are looking at a valuation below $400m. Given such circumstances filing for IPO probably doesn't mean much either.