Peloton To Peddle Shares At $26 to $29 In Bid To Raise Up To $1.2B In Its IPO Cycle

Peloton is looking to raise up to $1.16 billion in its debut on the public markets, pricing its equity between $26 and $29 per share according to an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company plans to sell 40 million shares of its Class A common stock when it lists on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol “PTON.” According to the filing’s figures the company would be valued between $7.2 billion and $8 billion, without counting the underwriter’s option (Peloton’s valuation rises to between $7.38 billion and $8.23 billion including the extra shares).

The company last had a final private valuation of $4.15 billion, via its Series F round which closed in August 2018.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

If the initial public offering prices at the top of its targeted price range, Peloton could raise roughly $1.16 billion, not including the customary greenshoe option given to underwriting banks. Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are the lead underwriters on the transaction and, alongside other participants in the offering, retain the option to acquire an additional 6 million shares of PTON at the IPO price inside of 30 days of the offering. Exercising this option could net the interactive fitness technology company between $156 million and $174 million in additional capital.

Peloton shares have different amounts of voting power. The company’s dual class structure of the stock gives Class A common stockholders one vote per share, while reserving 20 votes per share for Class B shareholders. In other words, public market investors will have much less say in the governance of Peloton.

This method of preventing regular governance by limiting the voting power of public investors is popular as it conserves control in the hands of founders, executives, and sometimes early investors. However, in some cases like WeWork, the setup can prelude to more bother than value.

The setup can also cause some indices to not include the stock. Snap, famous for giving new shareholders in its IPO zero votes per share, lost out on inclusion in the Russell 3000. Snap also ran into trouble with the more popular S&P 500 over its voting rights.

History

The company bills itself as “at the nexus of fitness, technology, and media.” It sells a nearly $2,000 bike, a treadmill, and a subscription service for streaming workouts. Peloton also reported in its S-1 that it has more than 1.4 million members and has streamed more than 58 million workouts during fiscal year 2019.

Peloton raised nearly $1 billion as a private company, including its $550 million Series F raised in August 2018.

The popular home-biking company’s beginnings were more humble, though; some of Peloton’s first funding came by way of a Kickstarter campaign, in which the company raised approximately $307,000 from 297 backers in mid 2013. Peloton may be the first company which launched through a crowdfunding campaign to go public on U.S. markets.

Peloton’s venture capital backers include firms like True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Tiger Global Management, among others.

When it filed its S-1 last month, it reported revenue of $915 million in fiscal year 2019, an increase of 110 percent compared to fiscal year 2018’s $435 million. Its losses have also risen, with the company reporting $195.6 million in net losses in fiscal year 2019, compared to $47.9 million in fiscal year 2018.

Such losses are not uncommon among quickly-growing private companies, though Peloton’s losses rising as the company’s revenue scales implies that its customer acquisition costs are rising over time. (This can come via overstuffed channels that worked at lower volumes, rising competition, or both.)

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias