On Wednesday, Reddit Inc announced it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering with US securities regulators.
Back in September, Reuters reported that Reddit, which was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, was hoping to reach a valuation exceeding $15 billion by the time it planned to list its shares.
The San Francisco-based company’s message boards have been at the heart of a pitched battle between small-time traders and large Wall Street firms that carried forward big gains in highly-shorted shares of companies such as GameStop and helped to grow the popularity of the term “meme stocks”.
At the peak of the craze in February, Reddit’s value doubled to $6 billion from the previous year and, in August, was valued at $10 billion in a private fundraising round.
In October 2020, Reddit had approximately 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities. In the second quarter of this year, the company reported $100 million in advertising revenue, almost a threefold jump from the same period in 2020.
