US-based social media company Pinterest plans to select bankers next month for an initial public offering that would enable e-commerce firm Rakuten to exit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The company was valued at $12.3bn as of its last funding round in June 2017, and people familiar with the company’s plans told the WSJ it expects to float as soon as April 2019 at a similar valuation.
Pinterest operates a social network with more than 250 million monthly active users as of September this year. It allows users to express themselves by ‘pinning’ visual images that represent their tastes.
The company has added an e-commerce element to the platform through the use of ‘rich pins’ that allow users to buy items by clicking on images, and it has also ramped up its advertising activities in recent years.
Reports of Pinterest preparing for an IPO first surfaced in July this year, and its hiring last month of Jane Penner, formerly head of global investor relations for e-commerce group Alibaba, to head its own investor relations, was viewed as a sign those preparations were moving forward.
Pinterest raised $150m in the 2017 round, from unnamed existing investors, bringing its equity funding to $1.25bn altogether.
Rakuten first invested in Pinterest in 2012, leading a $100m round that included Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and various angel investors.
BVP, FirstMark and Andreessen Horowitz also took part in Pinterest’s $553m series G round, which closed in 2015, investing with Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management Company and existing backers SV Angel and Valiant Capital Management.
