Venda, the ecommerce platform co-founded by Dan Wagner, is to float on the London Stock Exchange in an initial public offering – marking a return to the City for one of the original dot-com entrepreneurs.
According to reports, investment bank Peel Hunt has been appointed with a brief to prepare the business for an IPO. Venda enjoyed revenues of £17m in the year to the end of June 2012, with the company claiming more than £1bn in transactions across its infrastructure for the calendar year.
However, press reports of a corporate value of £170m – based on the valuation given to US rival DemandWare when it floated in 2012 – are widely regarded as excessive.
Venda counts Tesco, Laura Ashley, TK Maxx, Wickes, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Jimmy Choo among its users, and operates in the US, France and Germany, as well as the UK.
The core technology behind Venda is based on the failed online clothing site Boo.com, which spectacularly collapsed in May 2000 after burning through more than $60m (£38.1m) in a year.
Wagner picked up the technology for £250,000 in 2001, along with James Cronin, the former global operations director at Boo.com, who became co-founder and group CIO of Venda.
Wagner was behind a number of companies in the original dot-com boom – and bust – of the 1990s and early 2000s. His online information company MAID – Marketing Analysis and Information Database – was originally a dial-up information service enabling organisations to subscribe and download press cuttings and research.
It morphed into Dialog after it acquired Knight Ridder Information in 1997, a badly mis-timed acquisition when much of the online publishing world was moving to a free model. Dialog was subsequently named Dial-a-Dog by disgruntled investors, before Wagner renamed it Bright Station.
The bulk of the business was sold to Thomson-Reuters in 2000, while Wagner left in 2001 – almost immediately founding Venda.
