Adam Neumann, co-founder and CEO of The We Company, the US-based workspace provider backed by corporates including telecommunications group SoftBank, has sold more than $700m of his shares, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The buyers have not been disclosed but Neumann divested the shares over the course of a number of years, through a combination of sales and borrowing against their value. He remains the company’s largest shareholder.
The We Company’s lead brand is shared workspace network WeWork, but it has also launched two other offshoots: furnished apartment platform WeLive and education provider WeGrow.
The company is expected to float in the forthcoming months, having confidentially filed to go public in December 2018. It was valued at $47bn as of January 2019 when SoftBank invested $2bn to add to $3bn in warrant financing it had pledged for the early part of this year.
WeWork received $300m from SoftBank in early 2017 at a $17bn valuation before the corporate and its Vision Fund combined to buy $3bn in primary and secondary shares in August the same year alongside $1.4bn in financing it put up for three subsidiaries in Asia.
SoftBank had joined private equity firm Hony Capital to invest $500m in WeWork in July 2017. Hony, hotel chain operator Shanghai Jin Jiang International, conglomerate Legend Holdings and an unnamed family office had provided $690m of series F funding in 2016.
The company had previously raised an undisclosed total from investment and financial services group Fidelity Management and Research, JP Morgan Investment Management, Goldman Sachs, T. Rowe Price, Benchmark and clients of Wellington Management Company.
