TP Insight: The Lasting Benefit of Lifecycle Investment

Third Point’s own Daniel S. Loeb reflects on the recent IPO of SentinelOne and the benefits of a multi-stage partnership.

​​SentinelOne completed its initial public offering on June 30th. Today, it has a market cap of roughly ~$14 billion. We first invested in SentinelOne in 2015, leading its Series B round at a post-money valuation of $98 million, and Third Point’s Robert Schwartz joined the board. After participating at each subsequent round, as well as in the IPO and after-market, we now own over 10% of the company and Rob remains a board member.

It’s this kind of lifecycle investment that allows us to be a thought and financial partner from the earliest stages of a company’s growth, to where SentinelOne is today, post-IPO. It’s a crucial strategy that plays to our strengths and beliefs, particularly that growth is where the value is.

"While valuation always matters, we focus more on business quality, differentiation, innovation, disruption, and market structure."

Third Point is itself a “growth” company, particularly in our mindset around learning and evolution. We have taken this thinking about the intersection of growth and value a step further and moved decisively into building our capability to invest in “hyper-growth” companies, focusing on early-stage ventures.

Our initial investment in SentinelOne was made at a time when they had only a basic product and were at the earliest stages of revenues. From a financial point of view, I see this kind of early stage investment, although they begin as a small part of our portfolio, as an indispensable way for us to create significant positions which we would never be able to replicate by waiting for such companies to come public.

Our investment in SentinelOne is one I am particularly excited about—an experience in which we were able to add value to a young company, and continue to participate constructively and profitably across its lifecycle.