WeWork’s revenue — and losses — soar ahead of IPO, filing shows

As WeWork marches toward an IPO that could happen as soon as next month, the office-space company’s losses have continued to soar.

For the first half of 2019, the company generated $1.54 billion in revenue and posted a net loss of $689.7 million, according to an IPO filing the company released Wednesday.

The future success of the firm, which received a private-market valuation of $47 billion earlier this year, and was renamed the We Company, has been under intense debate as its business model of renting office space and subletting it at a premium is yet to be tested in public markets.

Despite the mounting losses, the company has orchestrated the largest IPO debt deal ever, in a $6 billion transaction that it says will close at the time of the IPO. It said it has commitments from several major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, HSBC Bank, UBS Securities and Wells Fargo.

The company said it now has 527,000 members across 528 locations in 111 cities. In addition to institutional lenders, major landlords are also betting on the company’s success, and have allocated high occupancy rates to the nine-year-old company.

Led by Adam Neumann, the startup plans to raise another $4 billion in public markets to continue funding its growth, the Wall Street Journal reported. It has already raised over $10 billion, a majority of which has been backed by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and affiliated funds.

Its public offering would be the latest in a string of debuts of hyped startups this year, following car-hailing services Lyft and Uber. Both of those startups, whose business models were untested by public markets, have traded well below their IPO valuations.