When asked about Boston marketing tech unicorn Klaviyo's plans for a potential IPO, its new CFO Amanda Whalen kept her answer short and open to interpretation.
"We'll see," she said. "We're gonna do what's right for customers, for shareholders, for our employees. We'll think about that when the time is right."
Whalen, 47, who was named to the role this week, spent over five years at the country's largest retailer by revenue, Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT), where her last position was executive vice president and CFO of Walmart International. She started her role as top financial officer for Klaviyo earlier this week, reporting to CEO Andrew Bialecki and taking the reins from interim CFO Jennifer Ceran.
Marketing automation platform Klaviyo, which doesn't share revenue numbers, became a so-called "unicorn" in 2020, when a $200 million round pushed its valuation above the $1 billion threshold. At that time, Bialecki told the Business Journal that an IPO might be in the cards in the next couple of years. Since then, the once-bootstrapped business raised a $320 million Series D round of funding that brought it close to becoming a "decacorn," or a startup whose valuation exceeds $10 billion.
That was about a year ago. Now Whalen, a Texas resident who plans to fly to Boston a couple of weeks every month, said she'd like to implement systems and processes for Klaviyo to be able to operate like a public company. Still, she avoided commenting specifically on any plans to go public at this time.
"I'm going to start operate like ... able to be a public company," she said. "There's just a lot that is that is involved with that, from a finance standpoint."
And she added, "The most important thing — always, from my perspective, for a CFO — is making sure that we're making smart investments and good allocation of capital to drive profitable growth for the future."
Whalen added that she first learned about Klaviyo by reading a profile of Bialecki on business magazine Forbes a year ago. She found herself interested in how the company was, her words, "transforming marketing technology by putting together all of these different data sources." At the same time, after five years at Walmart, she was ready for a new challenge.
One of the things that stood out for her about Klaviyo came from her retail background.
"I come from Walmart, and the customer is at the heart of everything ... If you serve the customer well, you're going to build and grow a sustainable business," she said. "For Klaviyo, customers just rave about the product. They love it."
Klaviyo is hiring for over 10 positions on the finance team, based on its website, including for directors and senior executives, and Whalen has already started interviewing candidates.
"We're really looking ahead to what are the systems and processes that we're going to need to put in place right now to be able to scale this business to much larger revenue dollars and beyond," she said.
