Lending Club s big IPO — the largest from California this year — just got bigger.
The San Francisco online lending startup on Monday updated its initial-public-offering share price by $2 per share, raising the range from $10 to $12 each to $12 to $14 per share. The company will sell 57.7 million shares when it begins trading as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, raising up to $807.8 million. That would rank Lending Club as the largest IPO of the year from a California company, nearly double GoPro s $427 million debut in June, which had been the leading the year so far.
At the middle point the price range, Lending Club would have a market value of $4.69 billion. The company, which connects lenders to loan applicants whose credit worthiness is determined in real-time online, is considered the leader in the quickly growing new sector of online lending marketplaces. Its big-dollar public debut will be a boon for the fledgling industry, and experts expect a windfall of IPOs from similar companies will follow. OnDeck, a New York-based online lender for small business loans, is set to raise $170 million when it goes public next week.
Lending Club is scheduled to set an official share price Wednesday evening after the markets close. The event will be followed by IPOs from San Francisco-based New Relic and Palo Alto-based Hortonworks, both big data firms that are expected to begin trading on Friday. In all, 12 companies are expected to go public this week, as December shapes up to be an unusually busy month. IPOs are traditionally slow during the holidays because investors are focused on wrapping up their deals for the year and not making new ones. Last year, there were 12 IPOs for the entire month of December, according to market intelligence firm Ipreo.
