In Lyft IPO, Wilson Sonsini, Goodwin Get the Work
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati will be leading Lyft's $100 million IPO, with Goodwin Procter representing the underwriters.
March 01, 2019 at 01:20 PM
4 minute read
Lyft, beating Uber to the punch, filed for an initial public offering Friday.
The IPO is being led by Palo Alto-based Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, while underwriters are represented by Goodwin Procter, according to Lyft's S-1, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the filing, Lyft said it's hoping to raise as much as $100 million. It has not yet disclosed how much the two firms are collecting from the deal in the way of legal fees and expenses.
Wilson Sonsini, which posted another year of growth in revenue and profits per equity partner last year, has long been prepping the ride-hailing company for its much-anticipated public market debut. The firm's lawyers have represented Lyft in several rounds of late-stage funding, including its Series E, F, G, H and I financing rounds.
Leading Lyft's IPO is Wilson Sonsini's corporate and securities partner Katharine Martin, who was tapped nearly a year ago to serve as chairwoman of the firm's board of directors. Other team members working on the matter include corporate partners Rezwan Pavri, who returned to the firm in early 2017 after a nearly three-year stint at Goodwin Procter, Lisa Stimmell and Andrew Hill, who also returned to the firm from Goodwin Procter last February.
Meanwhile, Goodwin's team is led by corporate partner Rick Kline, who moved to Goodwin from Wilson Sonsini in 2011 and currently serves as the co-chairman of the firm's capital markets practice. He is assisted by partner Anthony McCusker, who co-chairs the firm's technology practice, and partner An-Yen Hu in Silicon Valley.
The filling did not reveal whether Wilson Sonsini, a firm known for taking stock from its growing clients, owns Lyft stock.
Lyft applied to list shares on the Nasdaq Global Market under the stock ticker “LYFT.”
According to the filing, company co-founder and CEO Logan Green and co-founder and President John Zimmer will have “concentrated control” because of a dual-class stock structure. The filing did not specify what portion of voting shares they will have.
Lyft, which was founded in 2012, said its revenue doubled in 2018, from $1.1 billion to $2.2 billion. Its gross bookings reached $8.1 billion last year, up from $4.6 billion in 2017. But, just like Uber, Lyft still isn't profitable. The company posted a net loss of $911 million last year, which climbed 32 percent from $688 million in 2017, according to the filing.
In its filing, Lyft also said it had 30.7 million riders and 1.9 million drivers in 2018. With more than a billion rides last year, Lyft said it has 39 percent of the U.S. market share as of December 2018, up from 22 percent in 2016.
“In the transportation ecosystem, we are one of only two companies that have established a TaaS (transportation as a service) network at scale across the United States. This scale positions us to be a leader in the transportation revolution,” the company said in its S-1 filing.
Lyft expects to be valued between $20 billion and $25 billion in its IPO, up from its most recent $15 billion valuations last year, according to Reuters.
Uber, which was last valued at $76 billion after its latest round of funding in August 2018, also confidentially filed in December for an IPO.
This year has the potential to be a big one for massive tech IPOs, as many unicorns are finally set to take the plunge into public markets. Besides Lyft and Uber, social media site Pinterest also reportedly confidentially filed IPO plans this year, with Airbnb, Slack, Postmates and a list of highly anticipated tech companies likely to follow.
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