On Thursday, popular food delivery platform DoorDash announced it has confidentially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company.
DoorDash said in its announcement that the number of shares on offer and a target price range for the transaction “have not yet been determined.”
The brief statement also adds that the IPO “is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.” In recent days, the U.S. stock market has experienced significant downward pressure amid concerns about the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and speculation about the scale of its impact on the global economy.
As of 2017, the SEC has granted smaller, high-growth companies a path to initially file their S-1 registration statements confidently, allowing for regulatory review without immediate exposure to scrutiny from the media and would-be public market investors. Confidentially filed S-1 documents are made public prior to IPO.
According to Crunchbase data, San Francisco-based DoorDash has raised at least $2.07 billion in equity funding since its inception in 2013. Its last private market valuation was approximately $12.6 billion, post-money, earned in a November 2019 extension of the company’s Series G round.
The company’s backers include the likes of Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, CRV, Kleiner Perkins, the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, and the SoftBank Vision Fund.
DoorDash has never released a complete picture of its financials, which will be part of the IPO process. The company is not profitable and was expected to lose $450 million on revenue of between $900 million and $1 billion in 2019, according to a December report from The Information.
The company faces a number of labor disputes, as its “gig economy” workers are treated as independent contractors and are not eligible to receive benefits like health insurance. Earlier in February DoorDash was forced to pay $9.5 million in arbitration fees as it works through individual cases brought by 5,010 drivers for the platform who believed the company was in violation of California labor law.
