Digital Lending Platform Blend Labs To Raise $360M In IPO

The digital lending platform Blend Labs Inc. is going public.

The company announced Tuesday it had launched the roadshow for the initial public offering (IPO) of 20 million shares of its Class A common stock that could raise up to $360 million for the firm.

According to a company news release, the IPO price per share is expected to be between $16 and $18, with underwriters of the offering also getting a 30-day option to purchase an additional 3 million shares from Blend. These shares are expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BLND”.

Blend could be valued at $4 billion after the IPO, Reuters noted.

Lead book-running managers for the proposed IPO are Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC.  KeyBanc Capital Markets, Truist Securities and UBS Investment Bank will serve as book-running managers, with co-managers Piper Sandler, William Blair, Canaccord Genuity, Drexel Hamilton, Loop Capital Markets and Ramirez & Co., Inc.

PYMNTS spoke with Blend head of finance Marc Greenberg earlier this year, soon after the company announced it had acquired Title365, which provides property title and insurance settlement services.

The company has said this deal helps streamline the homebuying process, while also adding efficiency and transparency to its services as the platform scales across a broader number of financial activities.

The addition of title insurance and settlement services to Blend’s platform allows it to automate a number of functions that would normally be connected to manual and paper-intensive processes. The company launched in 2018 with a digital homeowner’s insurance offering and added a digital closing solution — Blend Close — in 2020.

In an interview with PYMNTS last year, Blend co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari said the company’s origins go back to the aftermath of the great recession.

“I had a couple of realizations,” he noted. “One was there’s a huge scale here where the numbers of consumers who can be affected and the scale of the monetary impact that [these lending decisions] can have on them is so great. The other was that the bank technology that was being used to do this — to make those decisions, was extremely paper and human intensive.”