in 2017, as ryan cohen prepared to take chewy public, both petco and petsmart approached with merger offers. petco's offer would be paid for in part using stock, whereas petsmart offered and all-cash bid that would also allow chewy to remain a completely separate business. chewy was acquired by petsmart in may 2017 for $3.35 billion, which at the time was the largest ever acquisition of an e-commerce business. allen & co. served as financial advisor to chewy on the deal. petsmart later transferred 20% of its ownership stake in chewy to private equity firm bc partners, which has owned petsmart since 2014, and also spun off an additional 16.5% of chewy to an unrestricted subsidiary in 2018. on april 29, 2019, chewy filed an s-1 for an initial public offering, intending to trade under the ticker symbol chwy. in its filing, chewy reported a net loss of $268 million on total sales of $3.5 billion for its 2018 fiscal year. chewy went public on june 14, 2019, at $22 per share.