- Utah business analytics firm Domo announces it will be acquired in a $400M deal.
- The company, founded in 2010, earned a valuation of $2 billion in 2017.
- Domo's founder hit it big with his first company, Omniture, acquired by Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion.
Utah business analytics firm Domo announced it has struck a deal to be acquired by Progress Software Corporation for $400 million, a steep discount for a company that breached a $2 billion valuation mark in a 2017 funding round.
Progress Software gets substantially all of Domo’s assets and employees, assumes certain liabilities but excludes net operating losses being carried forward, according to the Wednesday night announcement. Progress, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, says it “expects to continue serving Domo customers and supporting the Domo technology platform, while bringing additional scale, resources and enterprise software expertise to its ongoing development.”
Following the transaction’s closing, Domo will change its name and stock ticker and remain a separate, publicly-traded company with “limited operating expenses and a debt-free balance sheet,” per the announcement.
Domo founder and CEO Josh James, a Utah tech business veteran who is widely credited as the creator of the “Silicon Slopes” moniker, thanked his Domo staffers in a press statement.
“Domo has always been about helping organizations put data to work in ways that create real business value,” he said. “I am deeply grateful to the employees who built this company, supported our customers and kept pushing the platform forward through every stage of our journey. Their work created the opportunity that brought us to this moment. I believe Progress can provide a strong, long-term home for Domo’s business and help extend the impact of what our team has built.”
Domo’s Utah tech legacy
On Thursday, Clint Betts, CEO of Silicon Slopes, celebrated James’ legacy in a statement shared with the Deseret News.
“No one has done more for Utah’s tech ecosystem than Josh James,” he said. “From Omniture to Domo, now with a new company with plenty of cash, I’m excited to see what he does next and the legacy he continues to build.”
James, who studied business management at Brigham Young University, helped put Utah on the map back in the nascent days of its tech industry, years before Silicon Slopes would become a brand — and bragging point for state leaders — thanks to the success of his first business analytics startup, Omniture.
Founded in 1996, Omniture helped carve out a new business category, automating processes to customize websites and extracting data from social media sites. The company went public in 2006 and, according to his biography, James earned the distinction of being the youngest CEO of a company listed on the Nasdaq Exchange for Omniture’s three years on the platform. Omniture’s success would attract the attention of California software giant Adobe, which acquired the company in 2009 in a deal worth $1.8 billion.
The deal is frequently noted as a bellwether moment for Utah’s tech sector.
Ben Gaines, who was Omniture’s social media manager at the time the Adobe deal was announced, recounted the moment he found out his world was about to change dramatically, in a 2019 Deseret News story.
“At the time, I was the social media public representative for Omniture,” Gaines said. “So I was on Twitter all day ... checking in with customers and answering their questions and things and I just saw a search column on TweetDeck for Omniture all of a sudden just exploded with the news: ‘Adobe purchases Omniture for $1.8 billion.’”
The way the news broke in Utah was seismic. At that point, even with high-level, local tech success stories like WordPerfect and Novell a part of the state’s legacy, a fresh-faced Utah County startup had broken into a realm that had previously been a purview almost entirely dominated by California’s Silicon Valley.
Betts, then the executive director of Silicon Slopes/Utah Tech Council, told the Deseret News in 2019 that Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture and its decision to maintain the operation in Utah afterwards was nothing less than a “seminal” moment for Utah tech.
“Josh (James) and John (Pestana, Omniture co-founders) proved you can get a Silicon Valley exit without building a company in Silicon Valley,” Betts said. “It was a seminal moment for a variety of reasons and unquestionably sparked what we’re seeing now in the area.”
Betts said Adobe’s willingness to make a monster investment in a Utah company, and keep it in Utah, reflected back on the crop of Utah startups that, at the time, were working to get their efforts off the ground, not the least of which were companies like Qualtrics and Pluralsight.
Adobe has since deepened and extended its investment in Utah which now includes two expansive buildings just off I-15 in Lehi and over 700 Utah-based employees.
Unlike Omniture’s steady rise to success, and record (at the time) acquisition price, Domo’s path was one wracked by turbulence.
While Domo raised over $700 million in its first seven years, and earned that $2 billion valuation in 2017 (some industry pundits put the price even higher), it got a reality check just a year later when its IPO valuation came in at $511 million. Fiscal details in the company’s 2018 SEC filing reflected debt north of $800 million and 2017 revenues of $108.5 million against $176.6 million in losses. And the previous year’s balance sheet looked even worse, with revenues of $74.5 million against $183 million in losses.
In a 2018 Deseret News interview, on the day Domo went public and a company representative rang the opening bell at the Nasadaq, James was upbeat about Domo’s prospects, even in the shadow of the precipitous valuation drop.
“We just need to go out and do more of what we’ve been doing,” James said. “We’ve gotten to a level where we can really scale it up.”
