Blue Apron will raise $587M in its IPO, valuing itself close to $3B

Blue Apron, the meal ingredient delivery service that filed to go public earlier this month, has just priced its IPO. The company will price its shares between $15-$17, hoping to raise a maximum of $586,500,000. Using a $16 midpoint, this pricing gives the company a proposed valuation of just under $3 billion.

The company will be listed on the NYSE under the symbol “APRN”, and is expected to go public on June 28th.

The 30 million shares issued during the offering will be newly created Class A common stock, with one vote per share.

There will be an additional 157M shares of Class B shares outstanding, each with ten votes per share, meaning current shareholders of Class B shares will have 98% of the voting power for the company, with founder and CEO Matthew Salzberg holding about 30% of the voting power for the company. That being said, the corporate structure is still better than a company like Snap Inc., where the common stock issued during the IPO was entirely non-voting.

Blue Apron notes that they plan to use a portion of the proceeds from the offering to repay outstanding debts of about $125M, with the rest being used as working capital for the company.

Much of this new fundraising will probably be used for advertising – the company said it spent $61 million on marketing during Q1 2017, up from $25.4 million in the first quarter last year. In 2016 they spent $144.1 million in marketing, up from $51.4 million in 2015.

While Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods may give pause to anyone thinking of investing in the meal service space, there is still a lot of hype surrounding Blue Apron’s IPO, since it’s the biggest consumer tech IPO since Snap Inc.

Enterprise tech companies have continued to go public over the past few months, but consumer companies have held off – partially because of how poorly Snap’s shares have traded post IPO. A successful offering by Blue Apron will signal that the floodgates are still open for consumer offerings and hopefully give a good kick to companies that are on the fence about going public.