Medline (MDLN) – the biggest IPO of the year – jumped in its NASDAQ debut today. Shares of Medline shot up $6.00 from their IPO price to open at $35.00 at 12:52 p.m. EST. That first trade represented a gain of 20.7 percent from Medline’s IPO price of $29.00. Opening volume: 15.27 million shares.
Private equity-backed Medline would have a market cap of about $47 billion, based on that opening trade, according to Bloomberg.
At the IPO’s pricing, Medline had a market cap of $39.21 billion.
Medline’s stock was last trading at $37.42 – slightly below its intraday high of $37.50 – on volume of about 40.86 million shares at around 1:35 p.m. EST. The stock is up about 29 percent from its IPO price.
Medline (MDLN) increased its IPO’s size at pricing to 216.03 million shares – up from 179 million shares – and priced the deal at $29.00 – $1.00 below the top of the range – to raise $6.26 billion on Tuesday night, Dec. 16, 2025.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan were the joint lead book-runners. The investment banking team included another 21 banks as joint book-runners and yet another 21 banks as co-managers.
Medline intends to use most of the IPO proceeds to repay $4 billion in debt. Its total debt stood at about $16.8 billion, as of Sept. 27, 2025, according to the prospectus.
CEO’s ‘Costco’ Goal
Medline’s CEO Jim Boyle told CNBC that his goal is for the company to be “the Costco of healthcare.”
Medline, based in the Chicago suburb of Northfield, Illinois, is the largest provider of medical-surgical products and supply chain solutions serving all points of care, according to the prospectus. The company was founded in 1966.
“We are the largest company that you’ve never heard of,” Boyle said during the CNBC “Squawk Box” interview.
Medline is controlled by three private equity firms – Blackstone, Carlyle and Hellman & Friedman (H&F) – that agreed in early June 2021 to buy a majority stake in the company for about $34 billion in what was one of the largest LBOs (leveraged buyouts) of all time.
Blackstone and Carlyle were among the 21 co-managers of the IPO.
Eight cornerstone investors had indicated an interest in buying up to $2.23 billion of stock. Members of the founding family – the Mills Family – had indicated an interest in acquiring up to about $250 million of stock.
Medline is profitable, according to financial statements in the prospectus: Net income of $1.27 billion on revenue of $26.7 billion for the 12 months that ended June 28, 2025.
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