ZipRecruiter, the latest company to file for a direct listing, has set a date for its offering.
The online employment marketplace said it would make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange “on or about May 26, 2021,” a prospectus said. It will trade under the symbol ZIP.
ZipRecruiter itself is not selling shares with the offering and will not receive proceeds from the direct listing. Instead, its shareholders will offer up to 86,598,896 shares of Class A common stock for resale, according to the document.
ZipRecruiter will be the third company this year to use a direct listing to go public:Coinbase(ticker: COIN), a cryptocurrency exchange, used the method to list its shares in April on the Nasdaq, after the gaming platform Roblox(RBLX) did so for its March debut on the NYSE. (Squarespace, a website design company,has also filed to go public via a direct listing on the NYSE, but has yet to set a trading date.)
Companies mainly use direct listings because they’re cheaper than traditional IPOs and allow shareholders to sell their stock to the public without intermediaries. In a traditional IPO, a company sells shares and uses an investment bank or banks to underwrite the deals. But in a direct listing, a bank or banks typically work as financial advisors for the company going public.
ZipRecruiter has lined up six investment banks—Goldman Sachs(GS),JPMorgan Chase(JPM), Barclays Capital,Evercore Group(EVR), William Blair and Raymond James—to advise on the upcoming offering. However, only Goldman and JPMorgan Chase will consult with a designated market maker to set ZipRecruiter’s opening price.
Direct listings typically do not include lockups, which prevent shareholders from selling for a certain period of time. ZipRecruiter stockholders, similarly, will be able to selltheir shares as soon as the company lists later this month.
In a traditional IPO, a company will have a roadshow where the management team makes presentations to institutional investors to create interest in the stock. Direct listings have replaced the roadshow with the investor day, when investors typically learn about a company going public via a webcast meeting. ZipRecruiter is hosting its investor day on May 10.
Founded in 2010, ZipRecruiter is an employment marketplace for people looking for work and businesses seeking employees. More than 2.8 million businesses have used ZipRecruiter to find an employee while 110 million jobseekers have sought employment on the site, the filing said. The company became profitable in 2020, reporting $86 million in income from $6.3 million in losses in 2019. Revenue droppednearly 3% to $418 million in 2020, the prospectus said.
ZipRecruiter has raised $219 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. This includes a $156 million round in 2018 co-led by Wellington Management Company and Institutional Venture Partners, or IVP. IVP owns the biggest chunk of ZipRecruiter’s voting power—21.1%.
Several shareholders have registered their class A common stock, which they may or may not sell via the direct listing, the prospectus said. IVP has registered about 22.7 million Class A shares, while Wellington is offering roughly 1.9 million shares. ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegel has put up 10.5 million Class A shares.