Ashley Madison has made so much money from cheating spouses that it is looking at a London IPO
In fact, the extra-marital affairs dating website Ashley Madison is reportedly making so much money that it is looking to launch an IPO in London so it can raise £135 million ($200 million) to fuel a massive expansion.
According to an interview with Bloomberg, its head of international relations Christoph Kraemer said Ashley Madison wants to use the funds "for marketing and international expansion."
It also apparently picked London because of Europe's "liberal attitudes" towards adultery, even though it said that 50% of its business currently comes from the United States.
"Europe is the only region where we have a real chance of doing an IPO [because of its more liberal attitude toward adultery,]" said Kraemer in the Bloomberg report."We're no longer a niche, but it's been difficult in North America to find the support to go public."
"Right now our focus is to do our homework on London. It's our priority and our second attempt at IPOing has to go well. We don't want to repeat what happened the first time around."
Ashley Madison claims to be the second largest dating website in the world, just behind Match.com. It already has 36 million members in 46 countries. It already tried to launch an IPO in Toronto, Canada in 2010 but it failed following a lack of investor demand.
In 2014, it had $115 million in sales, which is almost a fourfold increase since 2009. According to the Bloomberg interview, Ashley Madison is targeting 50-60% of its sales to come from Asia by 2020.