US-based mobile commerce platform developer Wish filed on Friday for a $1bn initial public offering that would allow e-commerce group JD.com to exit.
Wish operates an app-focused e-commerce platform with some 500,000 merchants and 100 million monthly active users. It increased revenue 31.8% year on year to $1.75bn for the first nine months of 2020, though its net loss rose from $5m to $176m.
The company was valued at $11.2bn after its last funding round, a $300m series H in August 2019 led by a $160m investment from General Atlantic according to the IPO filing, pushing Wish’s overall funding to about $1.6bn.
Legend Capital, the venture capital firm formed by conglomerate Legend Holdings, had joined existing investors Formation 8 and GGV Capital, Founders Fund, Cherubic Ventures, Jerry Yang and Jared Leto in Wish’s $50m series C round in 2014.
DST Global led a $500m series D round for the company in 2015 that reportedly included $45m to $55m in funding from JD.com and which valued the company at $3.5bn. It was reported the following year to be raising $500m in a round set to be led by Temasek.
Wellington Asset Management was among the participants in a $250m round in 2017 that reportedly pushed the company’s valuation to $8.7bn. Its shareholding consists of about 43 million class A shares and almost 11 million class B shares.
DST Global owns 24.1% of Wish’s class A shares, Formation 8 holds 16.1%, Founders Fund 14.3%, GGV Capital 7.7% and Temasek vehicle Republic Technologies 6.2%. Founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski holds 64.5% of the company’s class B shares while Formation 8 has 6% and GGV 4.3%.
Wish’s holding company, ContextLogic, plans to float on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, and Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and BofA Securities are lead book-running managers for the proposed IPO.
Citigroup, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Investment Bank, RBC Capital Markets and Credit Suisse are book-running managers while Cowen, Oppenheimer, Stifel, William Blair, Academy Securities, Loop Capital Markets and R. Seelaus are co-managers.
