One year after raising $101 million (€98 million), Dataiku is becoming a unicorn. Following the wish of the French fund Serena to sell part of its shares, Dataiku brought into the capital of CapitalG, the venture capital fund of Alphabet, Google's parent company. The financial transaction, which brought in "a few tens of millions of euros" for Serena, mainly boosted Dataiku's valuation, which now stands at $1.4 billion (1.26 billion). The startup thus enters the very closed club of unicorns, these unlisted startups but valued at least 1 billion dollars.
WALL STREET TARGET IN 2-3 YEARS
Created in 2013 in Paris, Dataiku operates in the very promising - and competitive - data analytics sector. Between solutions of large groups (IBM, Microsoft...) and startups, Dataiku sells a software called "on-premise" (a software platform directly installed on customers' personal servers) called DSS, for "Data Science Studio". Designed for companies, it allows teams, internally, to collaborate on the same platform and explore the richness of internal data to extract relevant information and make business decisions accordingly.
In one year, the company has grown from 200 to 400 employees and claims 200 customers, mainly large groups.
"We believe that an independent software player in a specific market niche like ours in data analysis can coexist alongside the four giants Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon," explains Florian Douetteau, co-founder and CEO. Because our solution integrates into the cloud architecture of these giants and offers a complementary service. It is a small market of a few tens of billions of dollars that will eventually be shared by a large handful of players, including us," he adds.
The company's spectacular hyper-growth tends to prove it right. Since its first fundraising of 3 million euros in 2015, Dataiku has raised 14 million dollars in 2016, 28 million dollars in 2017 and 101 million dollars in 2018. In three years, the size of the company and its turnover - undisclosed - would have quadrupled. To the point that Dataiku now aims to go public on Wall Street within two or three years. An important point is that Dataiku went under the American flag during its 2016 round, relocating its headquarters to New York. Which spoils the party a little: if Dataiku's DNA remains tricolored, the startup is technically not a French unicorn.
A JUICY EXIT FOR SERENA
Florian Douetteau interprets CapitalG's acquisition of a stake in Dataiku as "a sign of trust and credibility". "This shows that our business is not in head-on competition with the four giants. We work with Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce. Having Google in the capital will allow us to accelerate even further," says the entrepreneur.
The financial transaction, for an undisclosed amount, was carried out following the desire of the French fund Serena to sell a fraction of its shares in the company. Present in the capital since 2015, Serena has replenished its cash resources by "several tens of millions of euros", while keeping "a significant share of about 10%" in the company, which will allow it to achieve a very profitable exit if Dataiku manages to be listed on the stock exchange. "They still have market share to gain and we want to stay with them as long as possible," says Xavier Lorphelin, co-founder and investor at Serena. Dataiku has offices in Paris -180 employees-, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sydney.
https://forinov.com/blog/Article/The_Franco_American_Dataiku_becomes_a_unicorn_thanks_to_Googles_entry_into_the_capital__54.html
