The Jamf office building in downtown Eau Claire, across from Phoenix Park.

Eau Claire-born, Minneapolis-based software firm Jamf has asked federal regulators for permission to sell stock to the public.

According to the June 30 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Jamf has more than 40,000 customers in more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, and has annual recurring revenue of $225 million.

Jamf, which was co-founded in 2002 by UW-Eau Claire grad Zach Halmstad, creates and licenses software used to connect and manage Apple computers and devices, such as iPhones and iPads. Jamf counts 24 of Forbes’ 25 Most Valuable Brands among its customers, and its software is used by businesses, government agencies, universities, and schools worldwide.

Jamf has more than 40,000 customers in more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, and has annual recurring revenue of $225 million.

Halmstad and co-founder Chip Pearson served as co-CEOs of Jamf until 2015, when they replaced themselves with currentCEO Dean Hager. In 2017, Vista Equity Partners, a technology investment firm based in Texas, became Jamf’s majority owner, and Halmstad and Pearson stepped back from Jamf.

Today, Jamf says it has nearly 1,300 employees, more than 900 of whom work in the United States – many of them based at the company’s office building in downtown Eau Claire. (Employees companywide have been working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hager wrote in a recent Forbes.com column.)

According to the initial public offering (IPO) filing, Jamf’s strengths include its strong relationship with Apple; its status as an industry standard for large-scale enterprises using Apple products (Jamf says it’s “the only vertically-focused software platform of scale entirely dedicated to the Apple ecosystem”); loyal support from the “Jamf Nation,” its online community of IT professionals; and the limitations of “outdated, overly Windows-centric” legacy software that does not “deliver the full Apple user experience.”

However, as CNBC.com noted in a June 30 article about the proposed IPO, Apple recently acquired Fleetsmith, “a four-year-old company, whose software makes it easier to remotely configure, wipe, and deploy devices.” According to CNBC, “JAMF said it currently sees Fleetsmith as focused on small and medium-sized businesses and not in direct competition for the same customers. ‘However, Apple could leverage this platform, whether through additional investment or the consolidation of other competitors of ours, to compete more directly with the scale and breadth of product offerings we provide,’ the filing warns.”

While the IPO filing acknowledges that COVID-19 has created uncertainly, it also notes that the pandemic “has accelerated the need for solutions to empower remote work, distance learning, and telehealth” – trends that could benefit a company such as Jamf.

The SEC filing also noted that the company posted a loss of $8.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, although this was a decline from the $9 million loss in the first quarter of 2019. Jamf also experienced a net loss of $32.6 million in 2019, an improvement over the net loss of $36.3 million in 2018.

If the filing is approved by the SEC – a process that typically takes at least a few months – you’ll be able to find (and buy) Jamf stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “JAMF.”