Reddit secretly files to go public at a $10 billion valuation

As you may recall back in September, we reported that Reddit was planning to go public and seeking to hire advisers for its U.S. IPO. The report followed a $700 million round in August at a valuation of more than $10 billion. Now the 16-year-old startup is ready to make its public debut after it quietly filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Reddit on Wednesday announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC to go public. However, the popular social news aggregation platform did not make the filing publicly available. Reddit also did not say how many shares would be offered nor the price range for the proposed offering.

As we reported back in August, Reddit was valued at $10 billion after raising $700 million in a funding round led by Fidelity Management. Reddit’s other backers include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, funds such as Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, and rap superstar Snoop Dogg. In February 2019, Reddit was valued at $3 billion following a funding round. Then exactly a year later, Reddit raised $250 million in new funding, doubling its valuation again to $6 billion.

According to SimilarWeb, Reddit is the number 20 most visited website in the world. The social platform has 1.75 billion unique monthly users, higher than the Microsoft Bing search engine with only 1 billion monthly unique users.

That’s not all. Reddit is also the operator of online message boards that became the go-to destination for day traders chasing this year’s frenzy for so-called meme stocks. The platform raked in $100 million in advertising revenue for the first time in the second quarter, almost a threefold jump from the same period last year.

Reddit has been growing exponentially since its inception 16 years ago. Today, Reddit has almost 2 billion in monthly traffic. The social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website has now grown to become the 18th-most-visited website in the world and the 7th most-visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa Internet data as of February 2021.

Co-founded in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian, Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion platform. As of October 2020, Reddit ranks as the 17th-most-visited website in the world and the 7th most-visited website in the US, according to Alexa Internet.