CarGurus, a Cambridge-based online car marketplace, has filed plans for its initial public offering, potentially setting the stage for it to become the first Massachusetts tech company to go public in 2017.
The company, which plans to list on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol "CARG," is looking to raise up to $100 million, according to the placeholder amount listed on the cover of an S-1 form filed on Friday with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The underwriters are Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company, RBC Capital Markets, JMP Securities and Raymond James William Blair.
CarGurus currently does not have a date set for when it would go public.
In 2016, the company brought in $198.1 million in revenue, a 101 percent increase from $98.6 million the previous year. The company's revenue for the first six months of 2017 was $143.3 million, a 70 percent increase from the same period in 2016.
The company's profits have been growing, too. In 2016, the company posted a net income of $6.5 million, versus a net loss of $1.6 million the previous year. For the first six months of 2017, the company's net income was $8.6 million, versus its net income of $500,000 for the same period in 2016. These figures are not adjusted for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, commonly known as EBITDA.
CarGurus said its online marketplace had a network of more than 40,000 car dealers, with over 5.4 million cars listed, as of June 30. In this year's second quarter, the company said it had roughly 61 million average monthly sessions in the United States, up from about 45 million in the same period last year. This contributed to the company becoming the most visited online car marketplace in the U.S., according to comScore, which also said that CarGurus has the largest mobile audience.
The total compensation for Langley Steinert, CarGurus' CEO and founder, in 2016 was $529,675, split between a $279,675 salary and a $250,000 bonus. However, the company's top-earning executive last year was COO Samuel Zales, who brought in $635,610 between a $335,610 salary and a $300,000 bonus.
According to the S-1, shareholders with the most voting power are:
- CEO and founder Langley Steinert: 61 percent
- Anastasios Parafestas, president of The Bollard Group: 8.1 percent
- Nicholas Shanny, co-founder of TripAdvisor: 6.9 percent
The filing also revealed how much capital CarGurus has raised. Through 2014, the company had only raised roughly $5 million — from friends and family, Steinert previously told BostInno — but then it raised a $68 million round in 2015, followed by $60 million in 2016, the latter of which was backed by T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Brokerage Services and other investors. the
Steinert, who founded CarGurus in 2005 after previously helping found TripAdvisor, told BostInno last year that the company was still considering going public. Earlier this year, Reuters and Axios reported that the company had hired underwriters for an IPO.
“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,” Steinert said in 2016.
