On the heels of news it had joined forced with Microsoft and Adobe to challenge Salesforce, C3.ai has announced its intention to file an IPO.
C3.ai is an enterprise AI firm founded by CRM legend Tom Siebel. In late-October, C3.ai announced it had joined forces with Microsoft and Adobe to challenge Salesforce’s grip on the customer relationship management (CRM) market. The new product, C3 AI CRM, is built on Microsoft Dynamics and integrates with Adobe Experience Cloud, all the while using C3.ai to put AI first.
The company is now filing for an IPO. The stock will trade under the ticker symbol “AI,” and will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares and price range have yet to be determined. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities will act as lead book-running managers.
“Assessing the IT landscape at the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that a new set of technologies was destined to constitute another step function that would change everything about the information processing world, dramatically accelerating the growth of IT markets,” wrote Siebel in the filing. “This step function of technologies – substantially more impactful than anything we had seen before – included: elastic cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, and AI or predictive analytics. Today, at the confluence of these technology vectors we find the phenomenon of Enterprise AI and Digital Transformation, mandates that are rising to the top of every CEO’s agenda. The global IT market exceeds $2.3 trillion today.”
Siebel was bullish on the company’s target market, as well as his company’s prospects within it.
“We serve a large and rapidly growing market, estimated to be $174 billion in 2020, growing to $271 billion in 2024,” he continued. “Our goal is to establish a global market-leading position in this market as we did at Oracle and at Siebel Systems. The difference being that this market is an order of magnitude larger than either of those opportunities.”
