GrubHub Seamless Inc. files confidentially for IPO

• The combined company processes about 150,000 customer orders on a daily basis.
• It generated over $100 million in sales last year. 
• It takes a cut, sometimes as high as 15-17%, of each order made through its online restaurant menu directory.

GrubHub Seamless Inc., the online restaurant menu and takeout-ordering service, has made a confidential filing for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.

Company officials have met with investment banks and could launch the IPO in the first half of the year, one of the people said. It is unclear how much the sale would raise or value the company at.

A spokeswoman for GrubHub Seamless declined to comment.

The company was formed by the merger of New York-based Seamless and Chicago-based GrubHub last year. Seamless had previously been planning on going public on its own.

Seamless was launched in 1999, then acquired by food-service company Aramark (ARMK) in 2006. Spectrum Equity Investors, a private-equity firm, bought a minority stake in Seamless in 2011 for $50 million. The rest of the company was spun out to Aramark's own private-equity owners as a dividend in 2012. Those firms included Warburg Pincus LLC, Thomas H. Lee Partners LP, CCMP Capital Advisors LLC and GS Capital Partners, a unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

GrubHub was founded in 2004, and had raised nearly $85 million in venture capital funding from firms including Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Origin Ventures.

The two companies announced their merger last May, then in August said that T. Rowe Price Group Inc. (TROW) bought a stake in the combined firm. T. Rowe's New Horizons Fund owned 1.4 million shares, worth $12 million, as of Dec. 31, according to a fund prospectus.

The two companies have absorbed a number of other online-menu providers. In 2011, Seamless acquired MenuPages and GrubHub acquired Dotmenu, owner of websites CampusFood.com and Allmenus.com.

GrubHub Seamless has 28,000 restaurants across 600 cities that post menus or allow customers to order through the company's websites, and generated $100 million-plus in revenue in 2012.

Under U.S. securities rules, companies with less than $1 billion in revenues in the past fiscal year can initially file secretly with regulators for a public offering.