Financial planning software firm Anaplan raises $90M at a $1.09B valuation led by Premji Invest, looks ahead to IPO
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This round is the opening move in one of the cleaner enterprise-software arcs of the decade. In January 2016, Anaplan takes $90M led by Premji Invest at a $1.09B valuation — its stated intent is an IPO. The related coverage shows the plan executing on schedule: the company files for its IPO in September 2018, weeks after hiring a CFO, and closes up more than 40% on day one after raising $263.5M at roughly $2.1B.
The same coverage also supplies the endpoint: by March 2022, Thoma Bravo agrees to take Anaplan private at $10.7B, or $66/share, versus the $50.59 close the Friday before. That makes this 2016 round the entry point for measuring how much value was created between the last big private check and the take-private — a near-10x on the 2016 valuation. It also fits the moment: Apptio had been tapping banks around the same time for an IPO that could value it near $1B, marking the wave of cloud operations-and-planning vendors reaching scale.
First-order effects
- Anaplan crosses the billion-dollar mark while still private, giving Premji Invest a lead position in a company now explicitly signaling a path to public markets rather than a sale.
Second-order effects
- A $1.09B private valuation pressures rival planning and IT-financial-management vendors — Apptio among them — to either match the fundraising pace or rush their own IPO timelines to claim category leadership.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — late private round, IPO pop, then a private-equity take-private at many times the original valuation — enterprise SaaS becomes a lifecycle asset class where buyout firms like Thoma Bravo are the structural exit, not the exception.
The trend: Cloud business-planning software is maturing along a predictable arc from late-stage venture rounds through public listings to private-equity consolidation.