Groupon Files For IPO To Raise $750 Million

Frank Gruber June 2, 2011 Tweet

Today Groupon filed a S-1 with the SEC to raise $750 Million. Morgan Stanley will lead the underwriting of the IPO. To save you time, we have pulled out some of the interesting data points from the SEC filing that reports Groupon’s financials and other details pertaining to the business. So here it goes, Groupon has:

• Increased its revenue from $3.3 million in the second quarter of 2009 to $644.7 million in the first quarter of 2011.
• Expanded from five North American markets as of June 30, 2009 to 175 North American markets and 43 countries as of March 31, 2011.
• Increased its email subscriber base from 152,203 as of June 30, 2009 to 83.1 million as of March 31, 2011.
• Increased the number of merchants featured in it’s marketplace from 212 in the second quarter of 2009 to 56,781 in the first quarter of 2011.
• Sold 116,231 Groupons in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 28.1 million Groupons in the first quarter of 2011.
• Grew from 37 employees as of June 30, 2009 to 7,107 employees as of March 31, 2011.

We have followed Groupon for quite sometime, since they initially were a showcased startup at our Chicago mixer event in 2008 as The Point, which spawned the idea of Groupon and the rest is history. History that has been documented in the SEC filling notice as posted on the SEC.gov website today and we’ve including below in it’s entirety. Print it out, study it, share it, use it as coffee table book (it’s 269 pages long). We found some interesting names in there. We found the redemption sections for each round of funding that Groupon took to be interesting as you’ll find out just how much stock and money each investor, board member and such has in it.
Groupon IPO Filing Documents as published on SEC.gov
Groupon turned down an offer to be acquired by Google for what was rumored to be billions of dollars so some may wonder why they would IPO for a fraction of that. We won’t get into that in this article but let us know what you think about Groupon’s IPO in the comments below.