Snyk Series F

Tiger Global led a $530M round into a developer security tool at an $8.5B valuation in September 2021, and I need you to understand that this sentence contains every single red flag that would define the next twelve months of venture capital carnage. Snyk does code vulnerability scanning—important work, sure, but we're talking about 85x revenue multiples (they were doing maybe $100M ARR at the time) during a moment when Tiger was signing term sheets in Uber rides between other term sheet signings. This wasn't diligence, this was a game of hot potato played with billion-dollar checks, and everyone convinced themselves the music would never stop. The math here is so divorced from reality that my calculator just filed for emotional damages. Security is legitimately critical infrastructure for modern development, but that doesn't mean you can just multiply any revenue number by whatever venture capital was huffing that fall.

The timing makes me physically nauseous because September 2021 was that specific moment—you remember it, right?—when every SaaS company with double-digit growth rates suddenly "deserved" public company multiples in private markets. Zoom was still trading at fantasy prices, everyone was permanently remote, and VCs had convinced themselves that 2020-2021 growth rates were the new baseline rather than a bizarre pandemic-fueled aberration. Tiger Global was doing what Tiger does best: moving fast and breaking their own LP returns, spraying capital like a broken fire hydrant across growth-stage deals with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Accel co-leading provided some adult supervision I guess, but even the smart money was getting stupid in that environment. The NASDAQ was about to peak two months later, inflation was already ticking up, and the Fed was telegraphing rate hikes to anyone who cared to listen (narrator: they did not care to listen).

Here's what actually kills me about this deal: Snyk is probably a fine company building a legitimately useful product in a genuinely important category. Developer security isn't going anywhere, the shift-left security movement is real, and they've got solid enterprise traction. But none of that—NONE of it—justifies an $8.5B valuation when you're competing with Checkmarx, Veracode, GitHub's built-in security features, and approximately seven hundred other point solutions all claiming they've solved AppSec. The competitive moat here is "we have good documentation and developers don't hate us," which is admirable but not exactly a trillion-dollar insight. Their path to IPO looked crystal clear in September 2021 (just file the S-1 and watch retail investors fight over shares!) and impossibly murky by September 2022 when the IPO window slammed shut and started boarding itself up from the inside.

The exit math is where this deal transforms from "aggressively optimistic" to "legitimately concerning for everyone involved." To return even 3x to investors at this valuation, Snyk needs to become a $25B+ company—we're talking Datadog territory, CrowdStrike adjacency, the absolute S-tier of security outcomes. Meanwhile, they raised at a valuation that assumes they'd already won the entire category before proving they could actually defend their position or achieve the 40% Rule metrics that public market investors suddenly remembered they cared about. Those Series F shares are underwater, the common stock is probably worth whatever makes you feel better about your life choices, and somewhere a Tiger analyst is still insisting the unit economics work if you just adjust for one-time extraordinary circumstances (the extraordinary circumstance is "reality"). The founders are trapped, early employees are trapped, and everyone's waiting for a market recovery that might let them exit at their 2021 valuation sometime around 2027 if we're lucky.