How CrowdStrike's $11bn valuation compares with its rivals

CrowdStrike's IPO yesterday saw its share price quickly rise over 70 per cent

CrowdStrike listed on the Nasdaq yesterday, seeing a 70 per cent share price rise that propelled its valuation to $11bn (£8.7bn).

The newly public vendor is now up there with the big players in cybersecurity, with its new market cap drawing it close to behemoth Symantec and taking it well above the next-gen players that it entered the market with.

CrowdStrike had raised the price of its shares from between $28-$30 to $34 prior to listing, but closed it first day of trading up 70 per cent.

The IPO is being seen as a triumph by analysts, after more high-profile cases including Uber and Lyft struggled on their debuts.

CrowdStrike's trajectory has even surpassed next-gen security pin-up Palo Alto Networks, which went public with an initial market cap of just over $2bn, before rising 26 per cent on its first day of trading.

The vendor's current $11bn valuation dwarfs the $3bn price put on it when it announced a $200m funding round last year.

Below we have ranked the biggest cybersecurity vendors in the industry by market capitalisation. Where the vendors are privately held, we have taken the valuation given at the time of their most recent funding round - all of which were announced in the last couple of years.

The figure for Barracuda is the amount paid by private equity firm Thoma Bravo to take it private in 2017.

CrowdStrike entered the market at the same time as a number of other next-generation players and was often grouped as a disruptor, along with Cylance and SentinelOne in particular.

The trio were all founded within a couple of years of each other, with CrowdStrike the only one to IPO so far.

Cylance, meanwhile, was recently acquired by BlackBerry for a fee that many saw as surprisingly low.

CrowdStrike's success is built on its Falcon platform, which uses machine learning to detect and prevent attacks.

In a blog post, CEO and founder George Kurtz said that CrowdStrike has "distinguished [itself] as a market leader in end-point protection with its "game-changing technologies".

He said that building CrowdStrike in a cloud-first way, which was "widely considered risky at the time", has been key to the vendor's success.

In order to list on the stock exchange CrowdStrike had to open up its books, revealing sales of $250m for the year ending 31 January 2019 - a 125 per cent increase on the previous year.

However, net losses widened three per cent to $140m in the same year, as the vendor continues to pour money into its marketing efforts.

In the channel, CrowdStrike recently scrapped a two-tier model in Europe to instead work directly with its partners.

Adam Thornton, of CrowdStrike partner Bytes, said that the vendor has stolen a march on its next-gen rivals by building a comprehensive programme for partners.