Lending Club has filed a $500 million IPO, according to S-1 filings sent to the SEC.
Interestingly, Lending Club’s S-1 filing lacks key information that might give insight into the still-private company.
The New York Times noted that the S-1 did not include “the price range that the company will seek for its shares, which of its existing investors plan to sell their holdings, and on which exchange the company will list.” The S-1 also failed to identify a potential ticker symbol as well. While all of this information can be amended over time before the IPO, it is an interesting decision by Lending Club to not publish this information in the initial filing.
The S-1 did mention that Lending Club hopes to target the IPO in the $500 million range, propelling Lending Club to the upper echelon of publicly traded Internet companies. The filing also gave a peek into Lending Club’s drastic growth. Revenue grew 134%, to $86 million, and has originated $1.8 billion in loans in the first six months of 2014. But the cost of growth is becoming greater — Lending Club has already posted $16 million in losses for the first half of the year.
Based on a fundraising round that was held in April 2014, Lending Club was valued at $3.75 billion, and experts on Twitter have been estimating Lending Club to be priced at around $5 billion — a bit conservative by our estimates.