C3.ai, the artificial intelligence services company founded by software pioneer Tom Siebel, Friday evening filed for an initial public offering of $100 million worth of its shares[1], led by investment banks Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Bank of America.
C3 plans to list under the ticker "AI" on The New York Stock Exchange. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, C3 said.
Siebel, who was recruited to database giant Oracle in 1983, later founded the eponymous enterprise customer relationship management software firm in 1993. He sold that company to Oracle in 2006 for $5.85 billion, and went on to found C3 in 2009.
C3 came out of philanthropic work Siebel was doing in 2007 and 2008, after selling to Oracle. He was concerned with making an impact on the planet's energy and climate issues. He soon realized that being a for-profit company might ultimately have a greater impact.
Siebel, who is both chairman and CEO of C3, describes his ambition in the prospectus as being that of serving a $274 billion market that is a "magnitude larger than" either Oracle or Siebel's was.
Siebel refers to a gaggle of technologies, including AI, that have come together to create a new kind of combination he calls a "step function of technologies" that is "substantially more impactful than anything we had seen before."
They include, "elastic cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, and AI or predictive analytics."
Says Siebel,
Today, at the confluence of these technology vectors we find the