- General
- November 15, 2020
- 10 minutes read
A Dig Into C3.ai’s Financials
Tom Siebel, Founder and CEO, C3.ai. Photo credit: C3.ai Recently, C3.ai, an enterprise AI company founded by tech veteran Tom…
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| Tom Siebel, Founder and CEO, C3.ai. Photo credit: C3.ai |
Recently, C3.ai, an enterprise AI company founded by tech veteran Tom Siebel, filed to go public. It’s a company that provides a suite of AI software tools used to perform a broad range of tasks such as inventory management, fraud detection, and energy consumption management. The company makes money majorly on a subscription basis, whereas companies pay a fixed amount of money for access to its collective of AI software tools on a periodical basis.
In this article, we take a look into C3.ai’s financials and how it’s fared over time as it looks to debut on the public markets soon.
Revenue
C3.ai had $156.7 million in revenue in the fiscal year leading up to April 2020 and a net loss of $69.4 million the same period. In the previous year, the company reported $91.6 million in revenue and a net loss of $33.3 million.
Most of C3.ai’s revenue is generated from subscriptions, accounting for $135.4 million out of $156.7 million in its most recent fiscal year and $77.4 million out of $91.6 million in the year before that. The rest of C3’s revenue come from what’s listed as ‘Professional Services’, referring to use of its software on a contractual basis rather than recurring subscriptions.
As a private company that was founded in 2009, C3.ai has raised about $228 million in outside funding over the years. The company’s backers include notable names such as TPG, Sutter Hill Ventures, Breyer Capital, The Rise Fund, and of course C3’s founder, Tom Siebel, who sold his previous eponymous software company named Siebel Systems to Oracle for $5.8 billion.
Siebel has a storied career wherein he worked as an executive at Oracle between 1984 and 1990 before leaving and later founding a software company that sold for a big sum to the company.
C3.ai even with losses is well-capitalized, with $33 million in cash and roughly $212 million in short-term investments on its balance sheet.
Founders and Executives
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| Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State, is a board director at C3.ai and has been with the company since 2009. Photo credit: World Economic Forum, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 |
C3.ai has a team of founding members and executives that include technology and business veterans apart from Tom Siebel. The company actually has another co-founder by the name of Patricia House, a woman who also co-founded Siebel Systems along with Tom Siebel.
Also among C3.ai’s top brass include the former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who serves as a board member.
As expected, C3.ai’s founding team and executives are set to reap sizeable monetary rewards from the company’s public offering, with Siebel in line to reap the lion share thanks to a stake that includes 33.9% of the company’s Class A shares and 83.6% of its Class B shares. Other major shareholders in the company include co-founder Patricia House and Lorenzo Simonelli, a board member who’s the CEO of oil giant Baker Hughes.
Overview
C3.ai was originally founded as C3 Energy, being a company that provided energy management software. It later rebranded as “C3 IoT” to focus on the Internet-of-things market and then again as “C3.ai” to focus on the broader artificial intelligence software market. As C3.ai, the company has stuck to its roots and is a major provider of AI software to enterprises.
C3.ai was founded in 2009 and is now looking to hit the public markets 11 years after its founding. The company is part of a cohort of IPOs that are expected to happen in the late ends of this year or by early next year, other members of that cohort including DoorDash, UiPath, Bumble, Airbnb, and Wish.
