Minnesota-based debt collector Jefferson Capital raises $150 million in IPO

St. Louis Park-based Jefferson Capital raised $150 million after it completed its initial public stock offering this week.

Minnesota’s first IPO of 2025 was well-received by investors, who have already bid up shares 25% this week.

Jefferson Capital buys charged-off consumer debt from from clients that include Fortune 500 creditors, banks, telecommunications providers, credit card issuers and auto finance companies. Jefferson then handles debt collections with what it terms “a consumer-friendly payment and rewards opportunity.”

The company sold 10 million shares at $15 a share when it priced its offering on Wednesday. The company expected the offering to price between $15 and $17 a share and had hoped to raise $160 million.

In its first day of trading under ticker symbol JCAP on Thursday, shares rose to $18.54, up 23.6%. On Friday shares maintained the IPO bump, closing up a second day at $18.83.

CEO David Burton founded the company in 2002 after acquiring the consumer accounts of the old Fingerhut business, the once-ubiquitous catalog company that helped consumers finance their purchases.

Clients are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Latin America. Jefferson Capital offers clients a chance to concentrate on generating new business rather than on debt collections.

Jefferson Capital uses its propriety analytics to manage those purchased accounts to collect more money than it paid to acquire the debt.

Jefferson Capital became the first Minnesota-based public company to complete a traditional IPO in 2025 and the second in the last 12 months.

Maple Grove-based medtech company Anteris Technologies went public in December. It was the first Minnesota company to do so through a major IPO since Life Time in September 2021.

Jefferson Capital reported $433 million in revenue during 2024, up 34% from the prior year. It earned a $129 million profit, up 15% compared to 2023.

Had Jefferson Capital gone public earlier it would have ranked as the 45th largest public company in Minnesota according to revenue.

The IPO market in the United States has seen increased activity this year. According to Renaissance Capital, a provider of pre-IPO research and IPO-focused exchange-traded funds, Jefferson Capital became the 97th company in the United States to price an IPO this year. That’s a 43% increase over the number of companies that completed IPOs at this point last year.

The 97 IPOs that have priced in 2025 have been smaller, raising a combined $15.5 billion, 4% less than was raised in last year’s IPOs.

Shares of Jefferson Capital trade on the Nasdaq.

After Jefferson Capital’s offering, existing shareholders owned more than 84% of outstanding shares and new shareholders approximately 16%. According to Nasdaq rules, Jeferson Capital will be considered a “controlled company” because of the heavy insider ownership.

In a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the purpose of the offering was to increase the company’s capitalization and financial flexibility while gaining access to public equity markets for the company and its shareholders.