Expedia-owned hotel search company Trivago may go public by the end of November, according to a report from Business Insider.
Expedia has hired JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley to run the initial public offering. Analysts have valued Trivago at more than $5 billion, and sources told Business Insider the company could be looking to raise at least $1 billion in its IPO.
Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in July the company was considering an IPO for Trivago by the end of the year. The move would not be a spinoff, and Expedia said at the time it did not plan to sell off any of its shares in the Düsseldorf, Germany-based hotel search company.
In 2012, Expedia acquired a 61.6 percent of Trivago for $632 million. Trivago brought in $201 million in revenue in the second quarter, an increase of 41 percent over this time last year, Bellevue, Wash.-based Expedia reported in July.
An IPO would help the founders of Trivago, who still own more than a third of the business, get some money back. At the GeekWire Summit 2016, Khosrowshahi said Trivago has always remained independent of Expedia, so valuing it as a standalone company makes sense.
“It has to be quite separate, and it has to always view the consumer as king and can’t orders from us,” Khosrowshahi said at the Summit. “Otherwise, they’re not optimizing for the consumer, and if you don’t optimize for the consumer on the internet, you are dead.”
After a slow start to the year, the IPO market is heating up. According to Renaissance Capital, so far this year, 106 companies have filed to go public, which is a 51 percent decrease over 2015. More than half of those filings, 62 to be exact, have happened since June.
Locally, Apptio, which makes software that helps CIOs better understand spending in IT departments, went public in September. It was the second Seattle-area technology company to go public this year, following in the footsteps of RFID chip maker Impinj, which went public in August.
