Carbon Black forecasting $200m revenue in first year on stock exchange

Cybersecurity vendor sees revenue climb following IPO in May

Next-gen end-point protection vendor Carbon Black expects revenue to top $200m in its first year on the stock exchange, according to the vendor's first quarterly filing.

For the three months ending 31 March 2018 Carbon Black saw revenue increase 35 per cent year on year to $48.4m, with gross profit also rising 35 per cent to $38.2m.

The vendor however reported an operating loss of $17.8m, with sales and marketing the biggest contributor to $56m of operating expenses.

On an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley attributed some of the revenue growth to the success the vendor is seeing in replacing legacy antivirus (AV) vendors in the market.

"The majority of wins that we're seeing with [next-gen AV product] Cb Defense in the marketplace are AV takeouts," he said.

"That's a rip and replace where we're actually replacing traditional providers.

"What we're seeing is that on the pricing side we've been able to maintain the pricing levels we've had historically, even against some of the traditional providers who in some cases are pricing less than us.

"What customers are seeing in the value of our solution allows us to do that. We've been able to maintain that."

Carbon Black is the first in the group of next-gen security players - including the likes of Cylance, Crowdstrike and SentinelOne - to go public, and therefore publish its numbers.

Carbon Black splits its revenue into two categories - subscription sales and services - with services contributing $3m.

The firm also touted its performance in the cloud space, with cloud revenue up 195 per cent year on year to $11.7m.

In its forecast Carbon Black said it expects revenue to be between $203m and $204.5m for the full year.

By way of comparison, earlier this year Cylance claimed to have hit a revenue run rate of $100m.

Carbon Black's share price initially fell four per cent in after-hours trading, before climbing 11 per cent.