Endpoint security solutions provider Carbon Black this week announced that it has filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock.
Waltham, Massachusetts-based Carbon Black says it’s looking to raise $100 million in the IPO. The company’s stock will be traded on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CBLK.
Rumors of a Carbon Black IPO have been circulating for years, with some reports saying that the company filed confidentially for an IPO back in 2016.
Carbon Black has raised more than $191 million in over a dozen funding rounds since it was founded in 2002. The company was initially called Bit9, but in 2016, two years after a merger with Carbon Black, it became Carbon Black. The list of Carbon Black acquisitions includes Objective Logistics, VisiTrend, and Confer Technologies.
In its SEC filing, Carbon Black says it has more than 3,700 global customers, including some of the world’s largest security-focused government agencies and enterprises. These customers are served by more than 900 employees.
The company says it has experienced strong revenue growth in the past years, increasing from $70.6 million in 2015 to $116.2 million in 2016 and $162 million in 2017. However, losses have also increased, from $38.7 million in 2015 to $55.8 million in 2017, which the company has blamed on its continued investment in growth.
Carbon Black’s endpoint security solutions include application control, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and next-generation antivirus capabilities. Competitors named by the company in its SEC filing are McAfee, Symantec, Cisco, FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Cylance, CrowdStrike, and Tanium.
The first cybersecurity firm to go public in 2018 was Zscaler, which started with an IPO price of $16 per share and closed the first day of trading at $33 per share. The company was hoping to raise $110 million, but ended up making nearly double that amount. The company’s stock currently trades at roughly $28.
Another cybersecurity company that went public recently is ForeScout Technologies, which raised $116 million in October in its IPO.
Financial experts have named several firms that could file for an IPO this year, including Illumio, Cloudflare, Tanium, AlienVault, Centrify and ForgeRock.
Related: Cybereason Raises $100 Million to Hunt Attackers
Related: Carbon Black Unveils “Streaming Prevention” to Thwart Attacks in Progress

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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