Sumo Logic went public the day after Snowflake, the biggest software IPO in history, and caught some of the same wind. Its product read the endless text that machines write about themselves, called logs, and found the problems hiding in them. Engineers used it to spot outages and security teams used it to spot attackers. In September 2020, with the pandemic pushing companies onto cloud software, Sumo Logic was a ten-year-old company still losing money.

Logs as a Service

Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh founded Sumo Logic in 2010 after working together at ArcSight, a security software company. Older log tools ran on a customer's own servers and grew costly as data piled up. Sumo Logic ran its tool in the cloud from the first day, so customers sent their logs and paid for what they used. The bet was that as companies moved to the cloud, they would want their monitoring to live there too.

Snowflake's Shadow

Sumo Logic priced at $22 a share on September 16, 2020, above its range, and raised about $326 million. The next day it closed at $26.88 on Nasdaq, up 22 percent. The gain faded. Larger rivals such as Datadog and Splunk grew faster, and Sumo's shares sank below the IPO price. In February 2023 Francisco Partners agreed to buy the company for $12.05 a share in cash. The $1.7 billion deal closed that May, and Sumo Logic left Nasdaq.

Cover: Portrait of the Sumo Wrestler Ikezuki Geitazaemon, Utagawa Kunisada I (Toyokuni III). Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a sumo wrestler.