IPO season is in full swing, with RingCentral, Chegg, FireEye, Veeva Systems and Zulily representing just a few of the names to file or begin trading in recent weeks. Of course, the main attraction this season is Twitter and its long-awaited public offering, which finally rolls into town November 6th.
Twitter isn’t the only company slated to join the list of public companies tomorrow, however. Israeli-American website creation platform, Wix, will also be vying for its share of media attention tomorrow, as the company announced this afternoon that it will be setting its opening price at $16.50 per share — the high end of its expected $14.50 to $16.50 price range.
Trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “WIX,” the website creator says that it will offer 7.7 million ordinary shares as part of its public offering, with selling stockholders offering 1.9 million of those 7.7 million shares. After filing its initial paperwork back in May, Wix revealed last week that it planned to raise $119 million by offering 7.7 million shares at a price between $14.50 and $16.50.
However, the company’s final filing before tomorrow’s debut shows that it was able to raise slightly more than the expected $119 million figure, with the final total coming in at $127 million. With Wix pricing its IPO on the higher end of its expected price per share range and raising slightly more than its initial target, the company will likely see its valuation boost as a result.
Considering the valuation was pegged at $720 million prior to today’s announcement, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see that figure fall somewhere in the $750 to $800 million range. All in all, it’s a great finish to the pre-IPO process for the company, especially amidst all the hoopla surrounding its fellow IPO candidate, Twitter.
Founded in 2006, Wix set out to do for website creation what WordPress, Blogger (and later Tumblr) did for blogging and content creation beginning in the early 2000s. Riding the growing demand for “DIY”-style web design and publishing tools, and capitalizing on the maturation of web-based technologies, Wix has since become one of the largest website creation platforms on the Web.
Having raised $60 million from a laundry list of investors, as of this month, Wix employs over 400 people around the globe and is now available in over 190 countries. Today, the company boasts over 37 million registered users and continues to see strong growth in its user base, with its latest filing revealing a growth rate of 34,000 new registered users/day.
According to that same filing, Wix reported a net loss of $12 million in 2012 on revenues of $44 million, with losses and revenue growing to $18 million and $56 million, respectively, over the first nine months of 2013. On the bright side, Wix said in its October filing that it had “achieved 14 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in the accumulated number of premium subscriptions … and 14 consecutive quarters of growth in revenues in collections.”
Breaking that down, this means that Wix generated $9.9 million in revenue in 2010, which increased to $24.6 million in 2011 and $43.7 million in 2012, while collections started at $13.8 million and grew to $29.6 million in 2011 and $52.5 million in 2012, respectively. In turn, Wix generated $34.1 million in revenue during the six months ended June 3rd, 2013, with its revenue increasing to $56 million during the following three months.
While the media attention and scale of Wix’s IPO tomorrow will pale in comparison to that of Twitter, Wix represents the latest in a growing list of successful exits and outcomes for Israeli-borne technology companies. According to Forbes, Wix will be the “largest U.S. IPO by an Israeli company since SodaStream International’s debut in 2010” and follows Google’s blockbuster acquisition of Waze earlier this year.
Israel’s startup ecosystem has continued to grow in stature thanks to the recent flurry of activity, which hasn’t been lost on the growing number of investors in the U.S. that are now pouring money into Israeli-borne startups. Wix, to that point, will only add more fuel to the fire, and its public offering tomorrow stands to make its investors — which include Bessemer Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and DAG Ventures — more than a few pennies.
For that reason, Twitter or no Twitter, there will still be more than a few eyeballs on the website creator’s public debut tomorrow morning. If the IPO goes well, Wix could open the door for a growing roster of Israeli companies looking to hit the public markets in the U.S.
For more, find Wix’s announcement here.