US-based social media company Pinterest filed for a $100m initial public offering on Friday that would enable e-commerce firm Rakuten to exit.
The offering will take place on the New York Stock Exchange. The $100m is a placeholder amount and not a direct reflection of how much Pinterest, which was valued at $12.3bn in June 2017 when it last raised funding, plans to raise in the IPO.
Pinterest runs a social media platform with more than 250 million monthly active users who post images of things that interest them, while others can ‘pin’ those images to their own boards.
The company more than halved its annual loss to approximately $63m in 2018 while increasing revenue 60% to more than $755m. It is in a relatively early stage of monetisation but plans to begin expanding advertising efforts internationally, beginning with Western Europe.
The offering will come in the wake of about $1.25bn in funding including $150m in the 2017 round, which included $30m from entities affiliated with investment and financial services group Fidelity according to the IPO filing.
Rakuten invested in Pinterest in 2012 as part of a $100m round that included venture capital firms and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark and Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), its earlier backers including SV Angel and Slow Ventures.
Fidelity Investments, investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, Wellington Management, Andreessen Horowitz, BVP, FirstMark, SV Angel and Valiant Capital Management provided $553m for the company in a series G round that closed in 2015 at an $11bn valuation.
Rakuten’s stake is sized at less than 5%. The company’s largest investors are BVP, FirstMark, Andreessen Horowitz, Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra, Fidelity and Valiant Capital Partners, though the filing does not give details of how many shares they own.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Securities, Allen & Company, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Barclays Capital, Citigroup Global Markets, Credit Suisse Securities (USA), Deutsche Bank Securities, RBC Capital Markets, Robert W. Baird, UBS Securities and Wells Fargo Securities are the underwriters for the IPO.
