Reddit is seeking a valuation of up to $6.5 billion in an IPO

Reddit is seeking a valuation of up to $6.5 billion in its upcoming IPO, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company plans to price its IPO between $31 and $34 a share, the person said. The Wall Street Journal first reported the expected scope and valuation.

Reddit filed for a public offering in February and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RDDT.

Employees will be allowed to sell Reddit shares during the offering, the source added. Reddit had a private market valuation of $10 billion when it last raised a $1.3 billion funding round in 2021, according to PitchBook.

At the top of the list, Sam Altman’s shares in the company would be worth over $400 million. The CEO of OpenAI led a $50 million funding round on Reddit in 2014 and said in blog post at the time that he had been a daily user of Reddit for 9 years and that the company was “an example of something that started out as a silly time-wasting toy and turned into something very interesting.” Altman served on Reddit’s board from 2015 to 2022.

Other notable shareholders include Tencent and Advance Magazine Publishers, the parent company of publishing giant Condé Nast. A year after tech entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman founded Reddit, Condé Nast bought the company before spinning it off in 2011.

In 2021, Reddit filed a confidential draft of its public offering prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company brought in $804 million in annual revenue for 2023, up 20% year-over-year from $666.7 million, according to the latest figures IPO prospectus. Its net loss narrowed to $90.8 million for 2023 from $158.6 million the previous year.

Unemployed Reddit forum moderators, known as Redditors, can participate in the upcoming IPO through the company’s “directed sharing program,” the filing said. Similar programs that allow community members or customers to buy at the IPO price have been offered by Airbnb, Doximity and Rivian.

Last summer, several prominent Reddit moderators locked down their communities or subreddits over disagreement with the company’s plans related to its application programming interface, or API, used by third-party developers to build apps on the platform. The change would force some third-party developers to pay more for access to Reddit’s API, depending on their usage.

Reddit said the API pricing changes were necessary because the company’s data is used by tech companies training large language models similar to OpenAI’s GPT family of software.

The company is now developing a data licensing model to accompany its core online advertising business, according to the filing. Google recently announced that it has an extended partnership with Reddit that allows it access to Reddit’s data.

Reddit’s debut on Wall Street comes during a historically slow period for IPOs, due in part to concerns about interest rates and global economic uncertainty. Reddit’s IPO will represent the first major tech offering of the year and the first social media IPO since then on Pinterest 2019 Wall Street Debut

John Tuttle, vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, said in an interview in January that the IPO market should improve in 2024, saying at the time: “We have a solid pipeline of different sectors and geographies.”

I’M WATCHING: Reddit going public will “force their hand” to learn to be profitable