Office-sharing giant WeWork on Wednesday formally filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission plans for its initial public offering, putting the New York-based company in position to be the second-biggest IPO of the year behind Uber (UBER) , and capping off months of speculation on when it would move forward with tapping the markets for capital.
WeWork on Wednesday filed its so-called S-1 form with the SEC to issue shares of Class A common stock. The company, which filed under the name ‘The We Company’ and will trade under the symbol “WE,” plans to exercise already outstanding warrants at an exercise price of $13.12 a share to warrants that “were issued to members at our first location.”
WeWork also will have Class B and Class C shares, which have 20 votes per share.
As part of the filing, WeWork disclosed additional financial information, most notably that it posted a net loss of $1.61 billion, or $9.87 a share, in 2018, nearly double the loss of $883.9 million, or $5.54 a share, it posted in 2017. For the first six months of 2019, the company disclosed that it lost $689.7 million, or $4.15 a share.
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“We have grown significantly since our inception,” the company said in its S-1 filing.”Our membership base has grown by over 100% every year since 2014. It took us more than seven years to achieve $1 billion of run-rate revenue, but only one additional year to reach $2 billion of run-rate revenue and just six months to reach $3 billion of run-rate revenue.”
Valued at approximately $47 billion earlier this year, WeWork has been targeting a fall IPO for some time, despite significant losses and steep debt. WeWork has raised a total of $8.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding since it was founded in 2011.
Its IPO is poised to become the second-largest offering of the year behind Uber, which was valued at $82.4 billion following its IPO in May on the New York Stock Exchange. WeWork is backed by SoftBank and its mammoth Vision Fund, as well as T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and others.
