Wish, the US-based e-commerce app developer backed by e-commerce group JD.com, is going public today in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market sized at just over $1.1bn.
The offering consists of 46 million class A shares priced at the top of the IPO’s $22 to $24 range, a price that reportedly values the company at roughly $17bn on a fully diluted basis.
Founded in 2010, Wish operates a mobile commerce platform with more than 100 million monthly active users across more than 100 countries. It posted a $176m net loss for the first nine months of this year, from approximately $1.75bn in revenue.
The company had raised about $1.6bn pre-IPO, much of its earlier funding coming from venture capital firms Formation 8 and GGV Capital.
Both were involved in a $50m series C round in 2014 valuing Wish at $400m, alongside Legend Capital, the VC firm launched by conglomerate Legend Holdings, as well as Founders Fund, Cherubic Ventures and private investors Jerry Yang and Jared Leto.
JD.com reportedly contributed between $45m and $55m to a $500m series D round led by DST Global at a $3.5bn valuation the following year, before Temasek was reported to be leading another $500m round in 2016.
Wish raised $250m from investors including Wellington Asset Management in 2017 at a pre-money valuation of $8.5bn, one lifted to $11.2bn in August 2019 when General Atlantic led its $300m series H round.
The company’s stock consists of about 478 million class A shares and almost 11 million class B shares, with founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski owning 64.5% of the latter, Formation 8 6% and GGV 4.3%.
DST Global has the largest portion of Wish’s class A shares, owning 21.7% post-IPO, followed by Formation 8 (13.3%), Founders Fund (12.9%), GGV Capital (7%) and Temasek vehicle Republic Technologies (5.6%).
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and BofA Securities are lead book-running managers for the offering while Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Investment Bank, RBC Capital Markets and Credit Suisse are book-running managers.
Cowen, Oppenheimer, Stifel, William Blair, Academy Securities, Loop Capital Markets and R. Seelaus are co-managers for the IPO. The underwriters have 30 days to buy up to 6.9 million more shares to potentially lift it to approximately $1.27bn in size.
