Shares of Walmart-backed Ibotta soar on public debut
NEW YORK — Shares of Ibotta, a Walmart-backed digital company that offers customers cash-back rewards and rebates on grocery brands ranging from Nestle to Coca-Cola, rose 33% in its Wall Street debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
The stock, which trades under the ticker “IBTA," opened Thursday at $117, well above the $88 offering price and outside of the originally expected pricing range of $76 and $84 per share. By mid-afternoon trading. shares had lost some of the momentum and were trading at around $100.
Ibotta joins a handful of tech companies like Instacart and Reddit that enjoyed a solid debut in the public markets. Last September, grocery delivery Instacart's shares finished the day up 12.3% at $33.70 on Nasdaq, giving the company a market value of more than $11 billion. Reddit's stock soared in its Wall Street debut in March of this year as investors pushed the value of the company close to $9 billion seconds after it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
The Denver-based Ibotta, founded by lawyer Bryan Leach in 2011, works with more than 850 different clients and represents 2,400 consumer packaged brands, according to its prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Walmart, Family Dollar, Kroger and other major retailers use Ibotta's artificial intelligence-enabled software, which delivers promotions that match customers' purchasing behavior.
Ibotta said it only gets paid when a customer sees a company's promotion and it results in a sale. Those customers get cash back every time they buy something in a participating brand's store or on their app, with the money deposited in their bank account or applied to a gift card. Ibotta said in its filing that it's given more than $1.8 billion back to customers since 2012.
Ibotta reported net income of $38 million on sales of $320 million last year. That compared with a net loss of $55 million on revenue of $211 million in 2022, according to the prospectus.
Walmart is listed
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