Billion Dollar Unicorn: Does Gaurav Dhillon Have Another Winner With SnapLogic?

According to an IDC report, the global cloud market is expected to grow to $118 billion by 2015 and will be worth $200 billion by 2018. The growth will be driven by an increased adoption of the hybrid cloud as organizations are still trying out the cloud and would like to use ways that help bridge the gaps between the comparatively low-security public clouds and the high-security private clouds. Something similar was envisioned by entrepreneur Gaurav Dhillon back in 2006 when he started his second Billion Dollar Unicorn company SnapLogic.

SnapLogic’s Offerings

San Mateo-based SnapLogic was founded in 2006 by Mike Pittaro and Gaurav Dhillon. Gaurav is an entrepreneur well known as the founder of Informatica before this venture. The idea for SnapLogic came about when Gaurav had left Informatica and was working as a board member and investor in other smaller technology companies. At one such board meeting, Gaurav became interested in the idea of the cloud, or as he used to call it, the “business Internet”. The idea behind SnapLogic was that while people were willing to get away from client servers to the cloud, they would prefer to do it the hybrid way. From his early days at Informatica, he knew that organizations would prefer to be offered a combination of on-premise and cloud services.

Today, SnapLogic has become the leader in Elastic Integration as they help companies connect enterprise applications and data in the cloud and on-premise to make them more efficient. The SnapLogic Integration Cloud allows organizations to accelerate the process of turning to the cloud with a fast, multi-point, and modern integration platform as a service. The application is able to stream data between multiple applications such as ServiceNow, Salesforce.com, and Workday with on-premise systems like SAP and Oracle through standard interactions that they call snaps. SnapLogic also addresses the issues surrounding Big Data by providing successful integration with next-generation analytics platforms through elastic data integration. They are powering analytics for services such as Amazon Redshift, Salesforce Analytics, and Tableau’s data visualization offering.

SnapLogic’s Financials

SnapLogic does not disclose their financials. They have claimed record growth though, with record breaking revenues each quarter and annual revenue tripling year over year. Their customer list includes the US federal government, ING, Fox News, Pandora, and Activision to name a few.

They have been venture funded so far with $60 million received from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Naval Ravikant, Brian McClendon, FLOODGATE, Triangle Peak Partners, Pharus Capital Management, and H. Barton Asset Management. Their last round of funding was held in October 2014 when they raised $20 million from their existing investors at an undisclosed valuation. But many believe that this may be Gaurav’s second big haul after his $5 billion IPO for Informatica back in 1999.

Earlier this week, Gaurav Dhillon joined me at a 1M/1M Roundtable conference. You can listen to the recording here. The most refreshing thing I heard Gaurav say at the roundtable was that he is interested in building a billion-dollar revenue company, not just a billion-dollar market cap company. Amen to that! I wish more entrepreneurs would be thinking this way.

More investigation and analysis of Unicorn companies can be found in my latest Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns. Unicorns will also be discussed with some special guests during our 1M/1M Roundtable programs over the next few weeks. To be a part of the conversation, please register here. The term Unicorn was coined in a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures.

This segment is a part in the series : Billion Dollar Unicorn