Compass 450m Ipowilhelmtechcrunch: Compass, which runs an online marketplace for buying, selling, and renting real estate, closed up ~12% in its trading debut on Friday after raising $450 million in an initial public offering. The company priced the shares at $22.00-$24.00 apiece.
The event marked the latest “unicorn” to enter the public market with a so-called “long-awaited IPO. The term refers to a privately held startup valued at over $1 billion.
Compass’s marketplaces consists of a network of 500 real estate agents and an online portal, called Compass, that allows customers to search for homes and apartments. The company claims it has facilitated $8 billion in transactions in the past year across its various properties, with plans to grow that by 50% a year over the next three years.
Compass’ founding and executive team includes former real-estate executives, including CEO David Pakman, formerly of Realty Mogul, a startup that was valued at $800 million when it went public in 2010.
The company has raised $150 million in venture capital financing since inception. Compass plans to use the IPO proceeds to expand its operations and pursue acquisitions of small and medium-sized companies that help it expand geographic coverage of its user base and property listings.
While the company has yet to turn a profit, it believes it is among the fastest-growing businesses in the real estate industry.
The first day of trading capped off what has been a terrific week for tech IPOs. Three companies listed on Nasdaq on Thursday, all seeing sharp moves higher in their intraday trading debut. Among them was Apptio, a cloud-based software company that provides financial data to IT companies and managed service providers. Shares of Apptio jumped 26.2% on their first day, after opening at $21.50.
For the week as a whole, the IPO market is up 32% compared to a year ago, according to Renaissance Capital. On Tuesday, social gaming company Zynga priced its IPO at $10 per share and received $210 million worth of subscriptions in its first trading day of public shares. Zynga was last valued at just under $7 billion.
The biggest deal of the week is likely to be that of anther gaming company, Caesars Entertainment, which will sell $500 million worth of shares at $18-$20 each in a so-called “tender offer.” Caesars’ last private valuation was $10.6 billion. The company had initially planned to raise as much as $1 billion but nixed that idea when it began seeking buyers for its own assets.
