3 lessons from Root’s IPO pricing

Last night neo-insurance provider and former startup Root priced its IPO at $27 per share, $2 per share ahead of its $22 to $25 target price range.

According to Root, it sold 26,830,845 shares in its IPO, including 24,249,330 from the company itself. Its underwriting banks have the option to buy another 4,024,626 at the IPO price, less “underwriting discounts and commissions.” The remaining shares are being sold by existing shareholders.

At $27 per share, Root raised $654,731,910, but that figure will rise to $763,396,812 if its underwriters exercise their option in full, using the full $27 price for our calculation. Per its S-1 filings, both Dragoneer and Silver Lake will purchase $250 million of Root stock at the IPO price once the IPO has closed.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Today, in a first, we have two editions of The Exchange for you. Get hype.

Root will therefore raise north of $1 billion in its IPO, once all shares sold are counted. Doing some loose math, Root is worth around $6.8 billion at its IPO price, though Renaissance Capital, an IPO specialist, puts the figure at $7.1 billion on a fully-diluted basis.

For the Midwest, Ohio-based Root’s IPO is a win. The company shows that it is possible to build high-growth, technology companies worth billions of dollars far from coastal hubs. For the broader insurtech space, Root’s IPO is a win. The company follows Lemonade to the public markets, setting a strong valuation mark again for the neo-insurance startup market.

For similar companies like Clearcover, MetroMile, and all startups that related to Root and Lemonade, it’s a good day. Let’s get into what we can learn from Root’s pricing.

Three lessons

Insurance multiples are hot. Key from Root’s IPO is the fact that we can now see insurance revenue being treated similarly to software revenue. How so? In multiples terms. Let me explain.

Root generated $245.4 million in revenue during the first and second quarters of 2020. That’s a run rate of around $491 million. At $7 billion, that’s a 14x revenue multiple. For an insurance provider with scant gross margins! Wild. And given Root’s weak-looking Q3 2020 revenues, that number isn’t going to fall anytime soon.

Investors are betting that Root’s history of growth will continue. In the first half of 2019, the company’s revenues were a mere 42% of what it pulled off during the same period in 2020. If the company can more than double again next year, then, hey, maybe all the numbers work. But to see public shareholders take such a growth-and-valuation flyer on an insurtech player is notable.

Kyle Nakatsuji, co-Founder and CEO of Clearcover, another neo-insurance provider, explained to TechCrunch via email what he thinks is going on: “It’s clear that the market is aware of the massive opportunity for technology-enabled disruption in the category and it is rewarding those companies that focus on customer-oriented, digital innovation. The rapid growth of key players in the space is now proving this will play out and the winners will be consumers seeing lower prices and investors seeing better returns.
”

,No matter who wins the election, or how the transition goes — if the markets stay rich, the IPOs can flow.