CarGurus, the Cambridge-based online car shopping platform, is reportedly going through the motions to become a public company — something that has been stated as a possibility by its CEO for years now.
The company enlisted Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co. to "help lead an upcoming IPO," Dan Primack reported in his Pro Rata newsletter for Axios Tuesday morning. A report later in the day from Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, said the "company aims to go public in the fourth quarter of this year at a valuation of more than $1 billion."
Reuters' sources, however, said the timing of the IPO could change.
CarGurus declined to comment on the record.
When I interviewed CarGurus founder and CEO Langley Steinert early last year, he said the company was still considering going public, though it didn't have a timeline for when that would happen at the time.
"We want to be the biggest automotive shopping company in the world."
We had previously reported that CarGurus' revenue in 2014 was on track for $50 million. Last year, Steinert said, it was "well north of that. The company has roughly 500 employees, up from 220 in February 2016.
Unlike most large tech companies in Boston, CarGurus has mainly been a bootstrapped effort, with Steinert only having raised around $5 million from friends, family and some of his former colleagues at TripAdvisor. He previously told me one of the benefits of not taking funding from venture capitalists was not having to reach an exit at a certain point.
"There's no artificial horizon that's being imposed to go public or sell the company, so we have a very long-term perspective: We're building something big here, we want to be the biggest automotive shopping company in the world," he said.
