3 Private Equity Firms Kick the Tires, But Proposed Price Wasn’t to Snyk’s Liking
Three cybersecurity vendors plunged into the public markets last year or this year as IPO conditions began to thaw after ice-cold markets in 2022 and 2023.
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Silicon Valley-based data protection vendor Rubrik kicked things off in April 2024 by raising $752 million on a $5.6 billion IPO valuation. Then in February 2025, Austin, Texas-based identity governance provider SailPoint raised $1.38 billion on a $12.8 billion IPO valuation. And just last month, Silicon Valley-based security service edge vendor Netskope raised $908 million on a $7.3 billion IPO valuation.
Back in September 2021, one of the hottest cybersecurity IPO prospects was Boston-based application security vendor Snyk, which was fresh off earning an $8.5 billion valuation in conjunction with its $530 million Series F funding round. But the hard economic reset of 2022 and 2023 made profitability more important than growth and performance more important than potential, complicating Snyk’s IPO hopes (see: Which Cyber Vendor Will Be First Off the IPO Starting Block?).
Snyk in 2022 lost $267 million on sales of just $147 million, according to public filings in the U.K. In 2023, Snyk revenue’s jumped nearly 50% to $220.1 million, while losses improved by nearly 35% to $175.3 million. Then in 2024, Snyk’s revenue growth slowed to 26.5%, with sales increasing to $278.4 million, while losses only improved by 5% and came in at $166.5 million.
The company’s topline growth decelerated further in the quarter ending month of June 2025, according to The Information, coming in at just 12%. That’s below security bellwethers Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Zscaler, which increased year-over-year sales by 16%, 21% and 21%, respectively, in their most recent quarters – despite starting with a much larger base of revenue.
Just How Much Has Snyk’s Valuation Fallen Since 2021?
Slowing growth, continued losses and increased competition in the code and developer security markets have turned a Snyk IPO from a sure thing to an increasingly unlikely prospect. The Information reported this month that Snyk has spoken with at least three private equity firms about a potential acquisition, but they couldn’t agree on the price. Snyk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The dispute centers around how much Snyk is worth today after hitting a high-water mark of $8.5 billion in September 2021. By December 2022, Snyk’s valuation fell $1.1 billion to $7.4 billion when it closed a $196.5 million Series G round. In mid-2023, T. Rowe Price marked Snyk’s valuation down to $6.9 billion, and BlackRock over the past year dropped its valuation of Snyk to $3.7 billion, The Information reported.
One private equity firm that considered buying Snyk in recent months proposed a price below $3 billion, which Snyk rejected, according to The Information. That’s only $500 million more than what Hellman & Friedman is hoping to get for Snyk rival Checkmarx, and just $900 million more than what Francisco Partners and Clearlake Capital paid to acquire Synopsys’ Software Integrity Group in October 2024 (see: Why Hellman & Friedman Wants to Unload Checkmarx for $2.5B).
Snyk for most of its history was considered a modern alternative to legacy application security testing vendors such as Checkmarx, Black Duck and Veracode, which was acquired for $2.5 billion by TA Associates in May 2022. But investors no longer see Snyk’s technology or its customer contracts as vastly superior to what traditional application security providers offer given the limited premium they’re willing to pay.
Forrester last year ranked Snyk’s static application security testing product third out of the 10 evaluated, behind Veracode and Checkmarx, with the technology analyst firm praising Snyk for fast innovation but criticizing the company for a lack of support for a variety of programming languages. The firm’s static composition analysis tool was ranked second by Forrester last year behind only Sonatype (see: Sonatype, Snyk, Black Duck Top Comp Analysis Forrester Wave).
Is Going Public a Realistic Path Forward?
The Information said Snyk plans to take advantage of renewed market conditions and go public in 2026 if it doesn’t receive an acquisition offer to its liking (the company drafted an IPO prospectus in January 2024, The Information reported). But the current financial expectations for a freshly public company in the cybersecurity sector would put an IPO out of reach for Snyk for the foreseeable future.
Snyk’s $278.4 million in sales last year pales in comparison to the $627.9 million of revenue Rubrik earned in the year prior going public, while SailPoint earned $621.5 million in the nine months before its IPO filing, and Netskope brought in $328.5 million in the six months before its IPO filing. Conventional wisdom dictates a cyber firm must have at least $500 million in sales to consider an IPO.
And SailPoint and Netskope were faring better than Snyk in their path to profitability at the time of their IPO filings, with net losses improving by 23.5% and 18%, respectively, at the companies, far better than the 5% improvement Snyk reported for its net loss during 2024. On the positive front, Snyk only burned through $30 million in the first half of 2025, putting the company on track for improved losses.
Snyk has relied on at least a dozen tuck-in acquisitions to expand its total addressable market since the company’s founding a decade ago, buying Swiss AI security research startup Invariant Labs in June to secure new AI workflows and protocols like MCP. And in November 2024, Snyk bought Portuguese dynamic application security testing company Probely to address the rising demand for API security (see: Agentic AI Security Gets Fuel With Snyk’s Invariant Labs Buy).
But given what The Information has reported about slowing revenue growth at Snyk, recent deal making hasn’t meaningfully increased the company’s top line yet.
Fortunately for Snyk, the company reportedly isn’t under pressure for an immediate exit. Snyk raised nearly $1.2 billion across 13 separate funding events, and a company spokesperson told The Information Snyk still has nearly $400 million in cash. Given the extent to which Snyk has reduced its cash burn, the company still has time to figure out its next step, though the options might not be any more palatable.
