Reddit files to go public

Reddit Inc., the social media platform that helped fuel this year’s meme stock frenzy, on Wednesday announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public.

The social media company did not make the filing publicly available. The company also did not say how many shares would be offered nor the price range for the proposed offering. Although Reddit was created in 2005, it has taken a unique road toward going public.

Conde Nast Publications acquired Reddit in 2006. The social media services remained a part of the publication company until it was made an independent subsidiary in 2011. Since then, it raised a series of funding rounds from venture capital firms.

Founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, most recently, the company announced that it had raised a $700 million round in August 2021 at a valuation of more than $10 billion.

Reddit had roughly 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities, or “sub-reddits,” as of October last year. The company saw explosive growth as a result of retail investors flocking to its message boards at the start of the year for tips on trading GameStop Corp and other so-called meme stocks.

At the time of that funding round, the company said that it had reached $100 million in advertising revenue during the second quarter of 2021, up 192% from a year prior.

In March, the company hired Drew Vollero who as the first finance chief of Snap Inc guided its transition to a public company as its first chief financial officer. The company’s biggest investors include Fidelity Investments, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Tencent Holdings.

Reddit did not disclose the number of shares to be offered or the price range of the IPO in the draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.