British food delivery firm Deliveroo announced plans to launch its hotly anticipated London listing on Monday after recording a surge in business during the COVID-19 pandemic, although it still posted a loss for 2020, Trend reports with reference to Reuters.
The initial public offering (IPO) is expected to value Deliveroo at more than $7 billion, based on a private funding round it completed in January, and will be one of the largest London listings in several years.
The company published a registration document and an expected “intention to float” -- which signals the start of the listing process -- on Monday, capping what has been a busy start to the London IPO season.
In an accompanying trading update, the company said it had grown the total number of transactions processed on its online platform, the so-called Gross Transaction Value, by 64.3% last year to 4.1 billion pounds from 2.5 billion in 2019.
It also narrowed an underlying loss to 223.7 million pounds ($308.93 million), from 317.3 million pounds in 2019.
“Today, Deliveroo is so much bigger than I ever would have thought possible,” founder and chief executive Will Shu said in the trading update. “We are building delivery-only kitchens, delivering groceries, building tools for restaurants to take them into the digital age - things I never contemplated when we launched.”