SurveyMonkey, that creates easy web surveys, raised $800 million in equity and debt and has made a record in capital investment raised by any other privately held US internet company.
SurveyMonkey has been doing good rounds with its intuitive web survey tools for data collection, survey forms and analysis. This startup kicked off in 1999 and has won accolades galore both in terms of branding as well as an affluent clientele comprising Facebook, Audi, Samsung and more. The beauty of SurveyMonkey is that it is efficiently priced and runs in a monthly subscription model.
With good profits and this current investment story in its pocket, SurveyMonkey still does not want to go public. Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey has been through IPO process while he was selling LAUNCH Media to Yahoo. So now he wants to avoid that hassle anymore with SurveyMonkey. He believes that going public incurs a lot of costs which is not worth the effort. So he is currently not planning for IPO.
The $800 million raised has a reason: to show some love to the shareholders! Yes, all of this will go to the shareholder. SurveyMonkey generates enough revenues to run the company. Dave Goldberg exclaimed as Techcrunch reported, “The money is not going into the business instead it is going directly to investors and employees. For us, this approach affords many of the same benefits — like the liquidity — of an IPO, without the roadshow, the distractions and the demands of meeting quarterly projections.” This stage was followed up with Tiger Global Management for a valuation of $1.35 billion and also on the other hand Google Inc is being added to the list of shareholders. This is indeed a strategic move and will help in taking the business to the next level.
Apart from this SurveyMonkey also had raised another $100 million as debt capital back in 2010 from Bank of America Merrill Lynch and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. So once this $800 million deal winds up this February, the total raised money would be $900 million.
