The Arista Networks IPO appears to be primed to go, as the company filed a revised prospectus today that puts its market capitalization at more than $2 billion.
Arista plans to sell 5.25 million shares at $36 to $40 each, the company disclosed in today's updated filing. Arista has about 56.1 million shares outstanding.
Arista has been relatively quiet about its IPO, and that's had some people worried. We were recently told Arista hadn't even done a road show to promote the IPO to investors, and we'd even heard speculation that Arista had scrapped the IPO completely. It was believable, given that the stock market bumped downward right after Arista's March 31 filing, and that the company's core software is the subject of a lawsuit.
It's likely Arista simply waited on setting its IPO pricing until the market improved — and until the U.S. Memorial Day holiday had passed, Bloomberg writes.
The filing also reveals, for the first time, how much of the company founders own. Specifically, Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista's chairman and chief development officer, owns about 22 percent of the company. That figure hadn't been disclosed in the original filing.
David Cheriton, a founder who's no longer with the company (and is suing it), is the largest shareholder, with about 13.9 million shares, or nearly 25 percent of the company. CEO Jayshree Ullal owns 4 million shares, or a 7 percent stake. Ken Duda, chief technology officer and another founder, holds 2.4 million shares, or about 4 percent.
The lawsuit that we keep mentioning here is between Optumsoft, which is Cheriton's current company, and Arista. Optumsoft sued Arista on April 4 over the ownership of tools and a software library that were used in the creation of Arista's EOS operating system. (Optumsoft had sent a warning letter in November.) Arista filed a cross-complaint on April 14, disputing Optumsoft's interpretation of the situation.
In today's S-1 update, Arista says it believes the disputed software components "are generally applicable tools and utility subroutines and not networking specific code." That would imply that Optumsoft isn't striking at the heart of Arista's intellectual property. But Optumsoft might ultimately claim ownership of more essential parts of EOS, as the S-1 implies.
Here's our previous coverage of the Arista IPO: