UK cyber security success story Sophos is set to IPO on the London Stock Exchange in a move which the firm claims will help it raise as much as $100 million.
Following its admission, slated for early July, it’s expected that the Oxfordshire-based vendor will become eligible for the FTSE 250.
The security player claimed it protects over 200,000 organizations and over 100 million end users in 150 countries, with a focus on the mid market of enterprises with between 100 and 5,000 employees.
Sophos estimates this market was worth $18 billion last year and offers great opportunity for further expansion given that it’s still poorly served by security industry.
However, the latest PwC Informaton Security Breaches Survey, launched at Infosecurity Europe 2015 this week, reported a leveling off of cyber security spending, in the UK at least.
Some 46% of large firms are looking to increase spending in the coming year, a lower figure than that of a year ago. When it comes to smaller businesses the figure is even lower – just 7% said they’d increase security expenditure in the coming year.
That said, there remains a strong demand for the products Sophos sells, if the number of data breaches is anything to go by.
The PwC report claimed that 90% of large organizations and 74% of small businesses have now suffered a breach, up around 10% from the previous year in both cases.
The cost of dealing with such a breach has also risen sharply. At the top end it rose from £1.15m ($1.76m) to £3.14m ($4.81m) for large firms and from £115k ($176k) to £311k ($477k) for small organizations.
Sophos said its plan for growth revolves around “continued innovation and expansion” of its core products; integration of endpoint and network-level technologies to enable better threat protection; improvement of its cloud-based offerings; and optimization of its channel first strategy.
Sophos claimed it had over 15,000 channel partners as of March.
“Bringing Sophos to the public markets will enable us to access capital, improve our global brand and enhance our ability to enable enterprises around the world, of any size, to deploy a simple and effective security solution,” said CEO Kris Hagerman, in a statement.
“This is a very exciting time for Sophos and UK technology. We are proud of all that Sophos has accomplished over its 30-year history, but we are even more excited about the road ahead as we embark on the next stage of our growth as a public company.”
It’s uncertain how much Sophos is hoping to be valued at but it could be close to £1 billion ($1.5bn), considering private equity firm Apax bought a majority stake in the firm five years ago, in a deal which priced it at $830m (£540m).