Arm appoints new CFO as it gears up for IPO

Arm has appointed former Splunk employee Jason Child as its new chief financial officer (CFO), as the company prepares itself for a public listing.

The company said yesterday that Child has over 30 years of experience in leadership at high-growth companies and scaling global finance functions. The new CFO will join Arm from 2 November, 2022 onwards and lead its global finance and IT organisations, reporting to CEO Rene Haas.

Child is set to replace Arm’s current CFO Inder Singh, who will remain at the company in an advisory role and help with the transition through November, before heading off to a new opportunity.

The new CFO most recently served as senior vice president and CFO at Splunk from 2019. Before Splunk, he had held several CFO positions including at Groupon, where he helped the company go public in 2011, as well as at Amazon International. He has also served as a member of the board of directors of Coupang, an e-commerce company, since April 2022.

“Jason is an experienced leader in global finance and technology,” said Haas. “His extensive experience in financial management at public companies and IPO execution will be invaluable in preparation for a potential public listing. I look forward to working with him as part of the Arm leadership team as we continue to define the future of computing, built on Arm.”

Additionally, the semiconductor company also announced two new board members, Karen Dykstra, former chief financial and administrative officer of AOL, and Jeff Sine, co-founder and partner of global merchant bank Raine Group. Dykstra is also a director on the boards of VMware and Gartner while Sine was previously a managing director at Morgan Stanley.

Arm was originally going to be taken over by Nvidia before the deal was cancelled earlier this year due to regulatory concerns, and has been mulling an IPO ever since.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank, the conglomerate that owns Arm, said in June that it was most likely to list the semiconductor company on Nasdaq, although underlined that no decision had been made, as reported by Reuters.

"Most of Arm's clients are based in Silicon Valley and ... stock markets in the U.S. would love to have Arm," said the CEO.

This was followed in September by reports that UK prime minister Liz Truss was planning on launching a last-minute attempt to convince the Japanese conglomerate to list Arm in London. The government was seeking high-level talks with SoftBank executives, which had previously ended following Boris Johnson’s resignation.