Indian origin founder-led startup Loom makes significant gain on Atlassian buy
Atlassian announcing a deal to acquire video messaging platform Loom for about $975 million on Thursday.
The startup’s cofounder and chief technology officer, Vinay Hiremath, is of Indian-origin, while cofounder and president Shahed Khan has Pakistani and Indian immigrant parents.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitNorthwestern UniversityKellogg Post Graduate Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Digital TransformationVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Professional Certificate in Product ManagementVisitHiremath was a college dropout from Illinois who moved to California in 2012 to work as an engineer. He met Khan while at Backplane, a social network builder. The duo had been building out the company with Loom's cofounder and chief executive Joe Thomas since 2016.
The video messaging platform helps 25 million users communicate through instantly shareable videos across 200,000 companies such as HubSpot, Atlassian, Uber, GrubHub and LinkedIn.
The three founders as well as current and former employees are estimated to have benefited with $400 million from the sale, EquityZen founder and chief strategy officer Phil Haslett said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. EquityZen is a secondary-markets platform that lets startup employees sell their equity to institutional investors before a company goes public.
Assuming about 10% of the proceeds ascribed to current and former employees, the founders have bagged $300 million for themselves, he added.
While the gains are significant, the San Francisco-based startup’s price is down 35% from its last valuation of $1.5 billion on which it had raised $130
