Low Casper valuation worries early investors
Casper’s celebrity investors may not be sleeping so well over the next several months.
Wall Street’s orders for the fledgling mattress company’s planned stock debut have been soft, but good enough for the stock to price as soon as Tuesday night, sources told The Post.
An IPO price at the low end of Casper’s target range of between $17 and $19 a share would have given the mattress seller a valuation of around $750 million — greater than when celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Leonardo DiCaprio bought shares in early fundraising rounds.
On Wednesday, however, Casper revealed it had cut the range to between $12 and $13 a share in an offering it expects to raise $92.5 million.
What’s more — like all early Casper investors — Kutcher and DiCaprio will also be locked into the stock for at least six months at a time when money-losing IPOs have been getting hammered. And Casper is expected to fare no differently when it starts trading this week, said Brian Hamilton founder of HamiltonIPO.com.
“One word to describe the Casper IPO: yuck. They’re losing money, they don’t have super-high growth and they’re in a commodity business. Bad,” Hamilton said.
The bed-in-a-box mattress seller, which promises a good night’s sleep mailed straight to your door, last month said it aims to raise up to $182.4 million in a stock listing that could value the company at as much as $768 million.
The IPO targets were a huge letdown to investors who bought shares in March at a valuation of $1.1 billion. Investors in a 2017 Series C funding round that valued Casper at $920 million are also expected to get hosed. That group includes retail giant Target and Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving, sources said.
Other early investors like DiCaprio and Kutcher are expected to be on safer ground — for now. The “Wolf of Wall Street” actor invested in a 2015 Series B round that valued the online mattress company at roughly $550 million, while Kutcher of “That ’70s Show” got involved in a 2014 Series A round at an undisclosed valuation that’s said to have been even lower.
The New York company had been seeking to drum up interest through a road show that left some investors feeling let down.
One potential investor who went into the company’s Thursday presentation at the St. Regis hotel in Midtown said he decided to pass on Casper after hearing executives like Chief Executive Philip Krim talk about their planned expansion to brick-and-mortar shops.
“It doesn’t make sense,” the investor told The Post on his way out. “Isn’t the whole thesis about being a disruptor?”