Reuters: Textbook Rental Company Chegg Files for IPO of up to $150 million

(Reuters) – Textbook rental company Chegg Inc filed with U.S. regulators on Thursday to raise up to $150 million in an initial public offering.

The Santa Clara, California-based company provides homework help, textbooks, eTextbooks, scholarships and supplemental materials from publishers like McGraw Hill, Wiley and MacMillan.

Chegg plants a tree for every textbook it rents or sells and has planted more than 5 million trees to date, according to its website.

The company, which offers more than 100,000 eTextbook titles, said it rented or sold over 4 million print textbooks and eTextbooks, and about 320,000 students subscribed to its proprietary Homework Help service in 2012. (link.reuters.com/wum42v)

Chegg expects to benefit from the growing education industry as the rising cost of tuition, fees, textbooks and declining public funding for higher education prompt students to switch to digital platforms like its Student Hub.

Chegg, originally called “the Netflix for textbooks,” started life as a website that allowed college students to save money on expensive text books by renting them.

The company, which has raised more than $200 million in venture funding and debt, counts Insight Venture Partners, Foundation Capital, Gabriel Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its shareholders.

The company plans to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “CHGG” and listed J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith as lead underwriter to its offering. Reuters reported in June that JP Morgan and Bank of America will lead the offering.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.