The parent company behind some of the biggest dating sites out there — Tinder, OkCupid, and Match.com — is about to shake up the market.
Match Group Inc., which owns the three sites, has filed with U.S. regulators for an initial public offering of common stock, according to a Reuters report.
Media mogul Barry Diller owns the company, and said this summer it would only offer 20 percent of Match in the IPO. The sites have exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly for their instant messaging and geolocation functions.
Revenue soared to $888.1 million last year, a 10.3 percent increase. It increased 19 percent to $254.7 million in the second quarter, which ended in June.
And Match has been busy in the acquisitions realm, snapping up PlentyOfFish for $575 million, a rival dating site. It made this move to expand its mobile-based dating services.
Match’s main competition is eHarmony, which is the No. 2 dating site company. The online dating market has risen to a $2 billion per year market.
The offering was underwritten by JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Allen & Co., according to the filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Match will be listed under the stock symbol MTCH. It has a fundraising target of $100 million.
Match.com currently serves 25 countries in eight languages, with headquarters in Dallas and other offices in Beijing, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and West Hollywood.
The company was founded back in 1993 by Gary Kremen and Peng T. Ong as a proof of concept for Electric Classified, a company that wanted to produce classified advertising systems that catered to newspapers.
Match.com went live all the way back in 1995 in the early years of the Internet, and was profiled by Wired magazine later that year.
The company was purchased by Cendant three years later, and was merged with another match site a year after that.
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