Healthcare Payments Software Provider Waystar Eyes $1B IPO

Healthcare payments software provider Waystar launched its initial public offering (IPO).

The company applied to list its shares on Nasdaq under the symbol “WAY” and said the estimated IPO price is between $20 and $23 per share, Waystar said in a Tuesday (May 28) press release.

Waystar intends to use the net proceeds from the IPO to “repay outstanding indebtedness,” according to the release.

With this offering, the company seeks to raise as much as $1.04 billion, making the IPO one of the year’s biggest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. At the top of the price range, Waystar would have a market value of about $3.98 billion.

Waystar had been waiting for the right market conditions to launch the IPO, according to the report.

The company said in August that its parent company, Waystar Holdings, had confidentially submitted a draft registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed IPO.

It said in an Aug. 24 press release: “The initial public offering is subject to market and other conditions and will only occur after the SEC completes its review process.”

In its S-1 filed with the SEC in October, Waystar said its cloud-based platform for healthcare payments is designed to improve “the administrative headwinds faced by providers.”

The healthcare industry accounts for more than 18% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and has wasteful spending estimated to range between $760 billion and $935 billion, the company said at the time.

“Of this, $350 billion is administrative-related, which is inclusive of healthcare payments-related waste,” Waystar said in the filing.

By Oct. 31, it was reported that the company’s plans to go public were on hold due to a shaky IPO market, stock market declines, conflict in Israel and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate plans, and that Waystar planned to wait until 2024.

More recently, there have been signs of a thaw after a FinTech funding winter.

As PYMNTS reported in April, with private capital growing more sanguine about the prospects of digital upstarts seeking to change financial services and valuations improving, there are likely to be more listings and more investors buying up publicly traded equities.