By Paul R. La Monica
Another day and another so-called unicorn is preparing to go public.
StubHub, the online and mobile ticket reseller that was once owned by eBay, filed plans to price its initial public offering of more than 34 million shares in a range of $22 to $25 a share. At the high end of that range, StubHub would be valued at more than $9.3 billion. It would raise more than $850 million from the stock sale.
StubHub, which eBay acquired in 2007 for $310 million and sold to European ticket reseller Viagogo in 2020 for more than $4 billion, is the latest well-known company to plan to test investors' appetites for newly issued stocks.
Six companies are planning to go public this week. They include the European buy-now, pay-later service Klarna and crypto brokerage firm Gemini, backed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the billionaire twin brothers of early Facebook fame.
StubHub plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol STUB and begin trading the week of Sept. 15. It isn't the typical unicorn, or privately held start-up with a valuation of more than $1 billion.
StubHub, co-founded by Eric Baker, its current CEO, has been around since 2000. Baker left the business after a falling out with his fellow co-founder before the eBay deal. He went on to found Viagogo, now StubHub's owner.
All that means that a quarter of a century after StubHub was born, Baker gets to lead it as a standalone public company. He has ironclad control, with an approximately 87.8% stake in the voting stock.
StubHub, which generates nearly all of its revenue from fees on ticket sales, reported revenue of nearly $1.8 billion in 2024, up nearly 30% from 2023. Revenue rose just 3%, to $827.9 million, in the first half of this year. StubHub isn't profitable, though, posting a loss of $2.8 million last year and another $76 million in red ink in the first half of 2025.
The ticket resale business is highly competitive. Concert venue owner and promoter Live Nation also owns Ticketmaster, which operates its own secondary-market selling service for music and sporting events. Privately held SeatGeek and Vivid Seats, which went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, are also rivals.
That leaves some doubt about how eager investors will be to buy shares of StubHub. The company could benefit from increased demand for IPOs, as shares of Circle Internet Group, Figma, and Bullish have surged from their offering prices.
But new offerings also tend to be volatile these days. These three stocks, as well as others that recently made their debuts, have all pulled back sharply after enjoying eye-popping early gains.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
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September 08, 2025 14:21 ET (18:21 GMT)
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