Bamboo receives nothing from the shares sold in its IPO, yet its amended prospectus now puts a number on the offering expenses it will bear: about $12.4 million

September 21, 2026 | prices as of the September 18 close

A blank amount now reads about $12.4 million

On September 14, Bamboo Insurance Services, a homeowners insurance MGU (managing general underwriter) that is still waiting to go public, filed an amended prospectus. It is the first version with a price range: $18.00 to $20.00 per share. Pricing has not happened, and neither has the listing.

Every share in this offering is sold by existing holders. The money from the sale goes to the sellers, not to the company. Even so, the original S-1, filed on August 28, already said the company would bear the costs of this offering. What was blank was the amount.

That line in the original S-1 left only the figure empty: "the offering expenses (other than the underwriting discounts) will be approximately $ million. All such offering expenses will be paid for or otherwise borne by us." The September 14 version puts about $12.4 million in that spot. The estimate covers items such as registration, filing and listing fees, printing, and legal and accounting expenses. It excludes the discounts and commissions of the underwriters, the securities firms that sell the shares to investors.

In the same version, the underwriting chapter adds a sentence: the underwriters have agreed to reimburse the company up to $2.5 million toward certain of its offering expenses. The company, for its part, will reimburse the underwriters for certain of their expenses up to $80,000. That $80,000 was already in the original S-1.

The sellers' names went in too

The original S-1 also defined "Selling Stockholders" with a line that pointed at nothing. The September 14 version fills it with two partnerships, CVC Blocker Holdco and Miramar Blocker Holdco. The filing defines the first as directly and/or indirectly owned by the CVC Funds, and the second as directly and/or indirectly owned by the CVC Funds and White Mountains. CVC here is CVC Capital Partners, a private markets manager headquartered in Luxembourg.

Our check of the amendment that filled in the sellers' line

The table cannot say anything about this company yet

On our scoreboard, $1,000 put into each of the eleven companies in the Recent listings group at its first-day closing price (for Freenome, the day its SPAC merger closed) comes to $11,300 as of the September 18 close. The same amount put into the S&P 500 on each of those listing days would be $11,583.

Bamboo is not one of the eleven. It sits in the group waiting to list. Until it has a share price, the table has no number for it. Even after that, the table will not show how the offering expenses were split.

The next place a number goes in is already visible

The September 14 version still has blanks. One is the underwriters' take: the underwriting fee per share and its total. The prospectus describes these as paid to the underwriters by the Selling Stockholders.

The sellers pay the underwriting fee, and the company bears the other offering expenses. How that blank gets filled is the next thing to look at.

A blank was not a place to skip

Of the lines left blank in the August S-1, the two covered here, the expense amount and the sellers' names, were filled in the September amendment. This is one company and two versions of its prospectus, and we chose which lines to check.

If you had noted where the August version was blank, you already knew where to read in the September version.

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