The company announced Tuesday it had launched the roadshow for the initial public offering (IPO) of 20 million shares of its Class A common stock that could raise up to $360 million for the firm.
According to a company news release, the IPO price per share is expected to be between $16 and $18, with underwriters of the offering also getting a 30-day option to purchase an additional 3 million shares from Blend. These shares are expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BLND”.
Blend could be valued at $4 billion after the IPO, Reuters noted.
Lead book-running managers for the proposed IPO are Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC. KeyBanc Capital Markets, Truist Securities and UBS Investment Bank will serve as book-running managers, with co-managers Piper Sandler, William Blair, Canaccord Genuity, Drexel Hamilton, Loop Capital Markets and Ramirez & Co., Inc.
PYMNTS spoke with Blend head of finance Marc Greenberg earlier this year, soon after the company announced it had acquired Title365, which provides property title and insurance settlement services.
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The company has said this deal helps streamline the homebuying process, while also adding efficiency and transparency to its services as the platform scales across a broader number of financial activities.
The addition of title insurance and settlement services to Blend’s platform allows it to automate a number of functions that would normally be connected to manual and paper-intensive processes. The company launched in 2018 with a digital homeowner’s insurance offering and added a digital closing solution — Blend Close — in 2020.
In an interview with PYMNTS last year, Blend co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari said the company’s origins go back to the aftermath of the great recession.
“I had a couple of realizations,” he noted. “One was there’s a huge scale here where the numbers of consumers who can be affected and the scale of the monetary impact that [these lending decisions] can have on them is so great. The other was that the bank technology that was being used to do this — to make those decisions, was extremely paper and human intensive.”
