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How ShotSpotter's Financials Compare with Previous Gov Tech Companies Pre-IPO

A look at data from other gov tech companies that have gone down SST's path.

SST, the company behind the gunshot-detecting ShotSpotter technology, is poised to become the next in a small handful of gov tech companies to go public.

The company is in the midst of preparing for an initial public offering, which would see it enter NASDAQ with the ticker symbol SSTI. And as part of the process, it’s making its financial details public through filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

That means putting its financial information alongside the other gov tech companies that have gone public. Of the six companies on the GovTech 100 list to offer shares to the public, we were able to mine the SEC database for pre-IPO filings from four — Itron and Tyler Technologies both went public in the early 1990s, and their filings did not appear readily available.

Two easy comparisons to make lie in revenue and net income. We pulled those figures for the two years prior to each company’s S-1 filings. SST’s revenue in that timeframe is middling — it recorded $11.8 million in revenue in fiscal year 2015 and $15.5 million in fiscal 2016. That outpaces the revenue from Taser (now Axon), which pulled in $2.2 million and $3.4 million before going public, but falls far short of Maximus’ $51.9 million and $103.1 million postings.

SST’s revenue growth rate in the past two years is the slowest on the list. The company’s revenues advanced 32 percent during that timeframe, compared with 55 percent for Taser and 98 percent for Maximus. NIC’s revenues skyrocketed to the tune of a 2,774 percent increase in the two years before its last filings.

Most companies on the list notched net losses in the two years prior to going public, and SST is no exception. However, the company’s losses of $6.2 million and $6.9 million were greater than almost all the marks set by the others on the list. The only larger net loss came from NIC, which had a $7.9 million red mark the year before its final filing.



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Below are the filings for each company on this list:

Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.