Student hub Chegg files for $150 million IPO

Chegg started as a Craigslist-style site that sold and rented cheap textbooks, but over the last decade it has become an online hub to help college students get tutoring, choose their courses, and take notes. Its CEO, Dan Rosensweig, has said he envisions Chegg as the “student graph” – an educational equivalent of Facebook’s social graph of user information.

Now, Chegg is taking another page out of the social network’s book:  it’s going public.

Chegg filed for an initial public offering on Aug. 14, and it’s hoping to raise $150 million. The company is valued at $800 million and, according to its S-1 filing, generated a net revenue of more than $213 million in 2012. It has already raised nearly $200 million from various investors.

The company has come a long way since it was created by a handful of Iowa State University undergrads in 2001.

Originally called cheggpost.com, it slowly grew until its textbook-rental service helped it become a go-to venue for students looking to save money on class materials.

In 2010, Rosensweig, who previously served as CEO of Activision’s Guitar Hero division as well as the COO of Yahoo, became Chegg’s CEO. Rosensweig’s Chegg has been a more aggressive company, expanding far past its textbook origins, once acquiring six higher education companies in just over a year.

See Page 2 for details on what high profile members have been added to Chegg’s board of directors.