American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion platform Reddit will be going public soon following a confidential draft registration statement that it submitted on Wednesday to go public with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The decision to go public follows shortly after Reddit raised $410 million in a financing round led by Fidelity in August, which raised its valuation to $10 billion. The company, however, had plans to close the Series F round at $700 million at that time.
As mentioned earlier by Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman, the investment made by Fidelity would give it more time to decide when and how to go public, and the company may finally be ready.
While there have been many indicators that Reddit has been preparing for its Initial Public Offering (IPO), the news only became confirmed on Wednesday after the registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). One of the major indicators of Reddit’s imminent IPO was after it hired Drew Vollero as its first-ever CFO. Drew Vollero had previously worked on Snap Inc’s IPO.
The content aggregating platform, in these past months, has faced mounting challenges such as presenting itself as a home for communities while trying to police hate speech. A subreddit earlier this year played a significant role in massive market rallies for companies like GameStop and AMC. The hype on Reddit has contributed to its financial success. In Q2, Reddit broke $100 million in advertising revenue. At last count in August, the site attracted 50 million daily visitors and hosted 100,000 active subreddits.
For now, Reddit has not announced when the IPO will take place or how many shares it plans to offer and how much it’d go for.
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, with Aaron Swartz, in 2005 and was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. In 2011, Reddit became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications.
As per information provided by Wikipedia, as of September 2021, Reddit ranks as the 19th-most-visited website in the world and 7th most-visited website in the U.S. About 42-49.3% of its user base comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.9-8.2% and Canada at 5.2-7.8%.
