Peloton IPO Update: Shares Spin Lower After Opening At $29

Fitness equipment maker Peloton (PTON) opened trading Thursday at $29 a share seeking to raise $1.16 billion and promptly spun lower.

The money-losing start-up, with a valuation of $8.2 billion – twice what it was valued a year ago -- priced its shares at the top of the range, floating 40 million class A common shares on the Nasdaq Composite index.

In early afternoon trading, shares were down more than 7%, hovering around $26.

Peloton beams on-demand workouts for its $2,200 exercise bikes and $4,000 treadmills equipped with 22-inch screens for a $40 monthly subscription fee. There’s also a $20 monthly subscription for those who don’t own the equipment. The company says it has 1.4 million subscribers.

Peloton revenue for the year ending June 30 was $915 million, double the previous year’s, but losses were up fivefold to $245.7 million. The company projects profitability in fiscal 2023.

Music publishers also are suing the company for $300 million for failing to obtain music licensing fees for its workouts.

Co-founder and CEO John Foley said he hopes investors will see the company’s momentum and doesn’t think pricing was out of line.

“We think we generally left something on the table in terms of pricing,” Foley told CNBC. “I feel like we weren’t greedy.” He said investors should focus on growth over the next two quarters.

The IPO comes as WeWork postponed its initial public offering amid of questions over valuation, and Uber (UBER) and Lyft (LYFT) saw their share prices plummet 30% and 40%, respectively, after initiating trading.

“You will see a lot of investors looking at this and saying what are the lessons learned from Uber and WeWork,” Michael Underhill, chief investment officer for Capital Innovations, a fund manager that participates in IPOs, told the Financial Times. “I wish them well, but I don’t think this will be a successful IPO.”

In other IPO news, Softbank is considering increasing its investment in shared office-leasing company WeWork by $1.5 billion. That would give SoftBank a $2.5 billion stake in the money-loosing company. WeWork also is in talks for as much as $4 billion with other potential investors, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the Financial Times reported.

WeWork aborted plans for an October IPO last week although the company said it still hopes to launch trading before the end of the year.