Tom Siebel speaking at the 2017 Delivering Alpha conference in New York on Sept. 12, 2017.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
C3.ai, the enterprise AI software company, filed its S-1 prospectus for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, and it plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AI.
C3.ai was launched in 2009 by Tom Siebel, who started customer relationship management software firm Siebel Systems and sold it to Oracle in 2006 for $6 billion. C3.ai’s software can read massive amounts of data and tell its owners — companies in industries such as aerospace, financial services, health care, retail and utilities — if something is about to break down, or the most efficient ways to use sensor data in their supply chain management. The company began life as a software venture for the energy industry. But after the recession, when spending on software in the energy industry had all but dried up, Siebel course-corrected.
Over the past year, the company has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to bring enterprise AI technology to the energy industry via Azure’s cloud computing platform. C3.ai also has Bank of America, Koch Industries, AstraZeneca, the U.S. Air Force, Army Aviation and the military’s U.S. Strategic Command as customers. The Redwood City, California-based company has raised $387 million from investors, including TPG Growth and Breyer Capital.
The company has made the CNBC Disruptor 50 list multiple times and most recently ranked No. 37 on the 2020 Disruptor 50 list.
C3.ai was most recently valued at $3.3 billion. The company did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
In March, Siebel announced a public-private consortium that will spend $367 million in its first five years to find ways to slow the ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
The entity, know as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, the University of California, the University of Illinois, the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. The goal is to have top researchers and scientists tackle huge social problems with the aid of AI. The first grant was announced in April. Three research teams have been awarded approximately $1 million in total for projects ranging from the development of mathematical models to predict the spread of Covid-19 to computational techniques that will detect the virus as well as help diagnose patients.
The company said in a statement about its planned IPO that it intends to list Class A common stock, though the number of shares and price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined. The release identifies Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Securities as the lead underwriters.
The IPO market has been hot, and the biggest IPO of the year, Snowflake, is another CNBC Disruptor 50 company in the enterprise software space. Airbnb, DoorDash and other hot names in tech including Roblox, are all expected to go public this year, according to recent CNBC reporting.
The Disruptor 50 is CNBC’s annual list of breakthrough venture-backed start-ups developing revolutionary new technology into scalable business models to build the next generation of great public companies. Join the CNBC Disruptor 50 Summit on November 18 to hear directly from founders and CEOs of 2020 Disruptor 50 companies, along with investors and start-up founders from around the world.
