Online used-car retailer Vroom Inc. announced Tuesday it has begun an initial public offering of 18.75 million shares of common stock.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the retailer pointed to opportunity in the highly fragmented used-car space and sought to paint itself as a company in growth mode as it reports losses.
Vroom expects the offering price to be $15 to $17 per share. That range would yield $281 million to $319 million.
The company has applied to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the VRM ticker symbol.
Much like Carvana, Vroom has sought to exploit the fragmented used-vehicle space by offering an easy online alternative for shopping for and buying cars and trucks. In its SEC filing, the company called the used-vehicle space a “massive market ripe for disruption.” It highlighted $814 billion in used-vehicle sales last year in the U.S., with 40 million vehicles sold. Within that, there was only a 0.9 percent e-commerce penetration and 9 percent market share for the top 100 dealers.
Vroom also pointed to what it says is a “scalable and flexible model.” It has a vehicle reconditioning center in the Houston area and uses a series of third-party partnerships to support its reconditioning efforts throughout the U.S.
“Our approach is a hybrid approach, which we view as asset-light,” company CEO Paul Hennessy told Automotive News in December, shortly after Vroom closed a $254 million funding round that brought the 6-year-old firm’s total capital raised at that point to $721 million. “So we’ll have a couple of our own reconditioning factories and then continue to scale by working in conjunction with other qualified, third-party reconditioning facilities.”
The web-based company has seen strong top-line growth in revenue while reporting losses, as it sees itself investing “in growth to scale our company responsibly and drive towards profitably,” Vroom said in its SEC filing.
Its revenue in the first quarter rose 60 percent to $235.1 million, but its net loss was $41.1 million, compared with a net loss of $27.1 million in the first quarter of 2019.
For all of last year, the company’s revenue grew 39 percent to $1.2 billion, while its net loss widened to $143 million from $85.2 million in 2018.
Goldman Sachs & Co., BofA Securities, Allen & Co. and Wells Fargo Securities are the lead book-running managers and representatives of underwriters in the proposed offering.
