Blue Apron Says It Could Be Worth $3 Billion After Its IPO

That’s a big delivery of greens.

Blue Apron has updated everybody on how much it expects to be worth once its APRN ticker symbol appears on the New York Stock Exchange, and that amount is … much more than it was just two weeks ago. Way back then, the original IPO paperwork said the company sought to raise $100 million. In a new filing today, though, that number’s grown to $500 million, which would make Blue Apron worth $3 billion whenever it goes public (the company says that date could arrive this summer). If stocks sell at the high end of Blue Apron’s price range — $17 each — that would raise $580 million and give it a market value of about $3.2 billion.

Of course, lots of variables are at play here. First, Blue Apron’s finances are kind of head-scratching: Revenue has grown very fast over the last three years, from $78 million to $795 million, but not fast enough to keep the company from losing at least $30 million each of those years. Next, the grocery sector is a complete madhouse right now: Prices are wildly low, Kroger and Walmart are about to face a cavalcade of low-cost European competitors, and now there’s an ever-present elephant in the room — Amazon’s announcement last Friday that it will buy Whole Foods, a game changer that will cause ripples through the entire industry. (Wall Street insider blog Dealbreaker’s headline today was pretty spot-on: “Hoping That No One Paid Attention to Anything Last Week, Blue Apron Starts Its IPO Roadshow.”)

Blue Apron’s powers that be know what they’re getting into, of course: In today’s regulatory filing, the company writes that “combinations and consolidation in and across the industries in which we compete” could result in “competitors with significantly greater resources and customer bases than us.”