(Bloomberg) -- KinderCare Learning Cos. shares rose nearly 8% after the company raised $576 million in an initial public offering priced toward the bottom of a marketed range.
The Partners Group Holding AG-backed childhood education company’s shares traded at $25.90 each as of 2:23 p.m. in New York, above their IPO price of $24 each. The company had offered the shares for $23 to $27 each, according to an earlier filing.
The trading gives KinderCare a market value of about $3 billion, based on the outstanding shares.
The share sale comes as US IPOs look to return to the pace set in the decade before the pandemic. Some $36.3 billion has been raised via first-time share sales on US exchanges this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s about a 64% jump from the same period last year, but still well below the average for 2010 to 2019, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
This is the second time in recent years that KinderCare had attempted an IPO. It postponed listing plans in 2021, citing regulatory delays.
KinderCare is the largest private provider of community-based early childhood education centers in the US, according to its filings. Based in Lake Oswego, Oregon, the company has about 2,500 locations in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
The company’s cash flow allows for the company to do the right things to fuel its growth, according to Chief Executive Officer Paul Thompson. KinderCare intends to use the proceeds from this offering to repay $548 million of loans and cover another $7.3 million worth of expenses, the filing shows.
“We knew that to have the right long investors in our book, it was the right thing to do to get our debt lower and to a level that made sense for high-quality investors to join us,” Thompson said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
“We can continue to gain market share, we can continue to grow organically within our existing centers and we also have opportunities to grow inorganically through additional new center openings and tuck-in acquisitions,” he said.
The company had net income of $103 million on revenue of $2.5 billion in 2023, compared with $219 million on revenue of $2.2 billion the previous year.
Funds affiliated with Partners Group own 71% of the shares after the offering, the filing shows.
The offering was led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The company’s shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol KLC.
(Updates with CEO comments starting in the seventh paragraph. A previous version of this story corrected the date range in the fourth paragraph.)
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