Postmates delivery service files for IPO

Startup among several high-profile S.F. companies seeking to go public

Another San Francisco unicorn has joined the rush to charge onto the public markets.

Courier startup Postmates has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. Postmates confirmed the filing in a brief blog post, which said the size and price range had not yet been determined.

Founded in 2011, the company delivers restaurant meals, groceries, packaged goods and other items via a network of independent contractors who operate their own cars, mopeds or bikes. The company has recently experimented with deliveries via autonomous cars and sidewalk robots.

Postmates has $678 million in venture backing, including $100 million raised in January, which gave it a private-market valuation of $1.85 billion.

Postmates competes with a raft of on-demand delivery companies, most of them dedicated to restaurant meals, including UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and Caviar.

Postmates differentiates itself from competitors by delivering other types of items, including Walmart grocery orders, Apple Store products and Shopify e-commerce items. It also offers subscriptions for users who pay a monthly fee of $9.99 for unlimited deliveries.

San Francisco ride-hailing giants Lyft and Uber also filed confidential documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December as a prelude to going public. San

Francisco’s Slack, which handles workplace messaging, filed confidential IPO papers Monday.

These companies are taking advantage of a 2012 law, expanded in 2017 to all firms, that allows pre-IPO companies to shield their finances from public scrutiny while they answer regulators’ questions. Eventually, however, they will have to make their filings public at least 15 days before they embark on roadshows to pitch their companies to analysts, fund managers and potential investors.

IPO filings are likely to be stalled because of delays caused by the federal government shutdown. During the 35-day partial shutdown, which ended Jan. 25, the SEC’s limited staff couldn’t review company filings, focusing instead on emergency situations. That created a backlog. The prospect looms of another government shutdown this month.

These pre-IPO companies have something else in common: They don’t make money.

Analysts say that many investors value warp-speed growth over profit generation, a theory that will be put to the test on Wall Street this year.