Qlik announced this morning that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling its intention to go public.

The company was founded in Lund, Sweden as QlikTech in 1993, and is now based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania in the US, a suburb of Philadelphia. At its founding, it was one of three companies in the wave of then-new business intelligence (BI) companies focused on self-service BI and data visualization. The others, Spotfire and Tableau, were acquired by Tibco and Salesforce in 2007 and 2019, respectively. The company's original offering was Windows-based BI solution QlikView. In the prior decade, the company transitioned to the more modern, Web-based Qlik Sense.

There's been a lot of consolidation in the BI space of late, with many pure plays, including the aforementioned two, being acquired by large enterprise software companies, cloud providers, and the like. Qlik, meanwhile, remained independent until 2016, when it was acquired by private equity group Thoma Bravo, which took it private. From there, the company has built out its business through acquisitions of its own, including Podium Data in 2018, Attunity in 2019, and automated machine learning provider Big Squid in 2021, resulting in products including Qlik Data Integration, Qlik Replicate, Qlik Compose, and Qlik AutoML.

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With these and other acquisitions, Qlik has sought to move past pure BI and enter the fray of data warehouse automation, data management, and AI, as well. In doing so, it has assembled a stack meant to rival those of its larger competitors or the companies that have acquired its smaller ones. The movement toward fuller stacks and capability sets reflects how the database, big data analytics, BI, and AI spaces have coalesced. This trend of more holistic data and analytics solutions has been driven by the cloud and digital transformation. It addresses the general need for end-to-end implementations involving data ingest, analytics, and machine learning.

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for Qlik's proposed IPO have not yet been determined. The company says it expects to complete its public offering following the SEC review process, "subject to market and other conditions."