Internet IPO-land: Angie's List is next
BYDan Primack
November 4, 2011, 10:19 PM UTC
Had enough Groupon IPO talk? Get ready for Angie's List.
Today's Internet IPO came from Chicago. The next one is expected to come from Indianapolis.
Fortune has learned that Angie's List, an online provider of consumer reviews on local services, is planning to price its IPO early in the week of November 14. The company plans to offer nearly 8.8 million shares at between $11 and $13 per share, which could give it a market cap of more than $720 million. BofA Merrill Lynch (BAC) is serving as lead underwriter, with seven other banks also listed.
Obviously this isn't in the same class of IPO as Groupon (GRPN), which priced its IPO at a $12.65 billion company valuation — and has seen that figure spike past $17 billion in its first day of trading. But Angie's List may actually be a better barometer for the long line of tech companies waiting to go public. For every upcoming Groupon-sized blockbuster (think Zynga), there are at least a dozen smaller companies trying to list. Companies like Cortina Systems, CafePress, InvenSense and WageWorks.
Angie's List is not yet profitable — it reports a $43 million net loss on $62 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2011 — but profitability no longer seems to be the key benchmark for IPO investors (see Groupon, Tesla, etc.). Instead, the larger issue seems to be steady growth, which Angie's has in terms of both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.
If successful, Angie's List plans to trade on the Nasdaq. It has raised over $88 million in VC funding from firms like TRI Investments (23.1% pre-IPO stake), Battery Ventures (18.2%), BV Capital (11.6%), T. Rowe Price (9.8%) and Aquent. It also secured $18 million in venture debt funding from Lighthouse Capital Partners.
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