DoorDash moves ahead with IPO, files to list shares on NYSE

DoorDash Inc., the biggest U.S. food delivery platform, has filed for an initial public offering.

The company, in its filing Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, listed the size of the offering as $100 million, a placeholder that will probably change when terms of the share sale are set later. Private investors valued DoorDash at about $16 billion in June.

DoorDash, which said in February that it had filed confidentially with the SEC, is set to join Airbnb Inc. in a finale to what is already a record year for IPOs. Driven mostly by the proliferation of special purpose acquisition companies, and to a lesser extent by software companies, an all-time record of more than $141 billion has been raised on U.S. exchanges in 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Along with DoorDash and Airbnb, online discount retailer Wish Inc. and installment loan provider Affirm Inc. are expected to complete IPOs by the end of the year, people familiar with their plans have said.

The listing also comes amid consolidation in the food delivery industry as players seek to gain market share. In July, Uber Technologies Inc. agreed to pay $2.65 billion in an all-stock takeover of Postmates Inc. In June, Europe’s Just Eat Takeaway.com struck a deal to acquire Grubhub Inc., which in October then announced a partnership with Lyft Inc.

DoorDash listed intense competition from its rivals as one of the key risk factors in its IPO filing. Its listing plans — along with the entire app-based service industry — got a boost this month, when California voters approved a ballot measure exempting certain app-based companies from a state law requiring gig-economy companies to treat their drivers as employees rather than as contractors.

DoorDash reported a net loss of $149 million in the nine months through September, on revenue of $1.9 billion, the prospectus shows. In the same period a year earlier, its net loss was $533 million on revenue of $587 million.

The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., with Barclays, Deutsche Bank, RBC Capital Markets and UBS Group. San Francisco-based DoorDash is seeking to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DASH.