McAfee finally pulled the trigger on its long-rumored initial public offering (IPO) this week. The security vendor is the latest in a string of tech companies seeking multi-hundred-million-dollar IPOs — or even multi-billion-dollar in the case of Snowflake — despite the pandemic-induced recession.

In its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission late Monday, McAfee set a placeholder amount of $100 million, but this figure will undoubtedly be updated later to a larger amount. McAfee will list under the ticker symbol “MCFE” on the Nasdaq.

According to its SEC filing, McAfee revenue hit $2.64 billion in revenue last year, and it posted a loss of $236 million. The company earned $1.4 billion in revenue thus far in 2020.

McAfee Files for Second IPO

Intel acquired McAfee for $7.7 billion in 2011, and five years later sold a majority stake in McAfee to private equity firm TPG for $4.2 billion.

The security vendor has reportedly been mulling either a return to the public markets or a sale for more than a year. Last summer, reports surfaced about McAfee preparing for an IPO that could value the company at more than $8 billion. The vendor was also a rumored acquisition target for Thoma Bravo before the private equity firm bought Sophos a year ago.

In January, the company announced it hired Peter Leav, former CEO of BMC Software, to replace its CEO Chris Young who had led the security software firm since it spun out of Intel in 2016.

Rocky Enterprise Transition

During its four years as a standalone security company, McAfee struggled to make the transition from a consumer endpoint business to an enterprise security powerhouse. But it made significant moves in this direction over the past 12 months including new tools and a strategy to unify its legacy endpoint security business with its newer cloud portfolio.

It also branched into container security with a product that integrates with McAfee’s cloud access security broker (CASB) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) technology. And at this year’s annual RSA security conference, McAfee announced a deal to buy browser isolation startup Light Point Security and rolled out new secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities.