Pinterest drops its IPO filing
Pinterest, the nearly decade-old visual search engine, has unveiled its S-1 as it prepares for an initial public offering expected in April.
Valued at $12.3 billion in 2017, Pinterest took its first official step toward a 2019 IPO two months ago,Pinterest-puts-an-ipo-on-its-pinboard-hiring-goldman-sachs-and-jpmorgan-to-lead-an-offering-this-year/">hiring Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters for its NYSE offering. Now it’s giving us a closer look at its financials.
The San Francisco-based company posted revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31, 2018, up from $472.8 million in 2017. It has roughly doubled its monthly active user count since early 2016, hitting 265 million this year. The company’s net loss, meanwhile, shrank to $62.9 million last year from $130 million in 2017.
In total, Pinterest has posted $1.525 billion in revenue across the last three years, roughly the same amount of capital it’s secured from venture capitalists since it was founded.
Pinterest has raised around $1.5 billion from VCs, listing both early- and late-stage investors on its cap table. The company’s key stakeholders include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity and Valiant Capital Partners.
Pinterest counts 250 million monthly active users and brought in some $700 million in ad revenue in 2018, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-over-year. The business employs 1,600 people across 13 cities, including Chicago, London, Paris, São Paulo, Berlin and Tokyo.
Pinterest’s IPO paperwork emerged just hours after another tech unicorn, Zoom, filed to go public, too. Several billion-dollar tech companies have made the choice to IPO in 2019, even after a weeks-long government shutdown caused a significant delay in IPOs. Pinterest follows Lyft, whichunveiled its S-1 and nearly $1 billion in 2018 losses just three weeks ago. Uber and Slack are both expected to make their IPO paperwork available to the public soon.
Pinterest may be looking to benefit of the IPO hype spearheaded by Uber and Lyft though The Information has previously reported the offeringPinterest-vulnerable">could suffer because it’s a social media business, which means it is often compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, a pair of companies that have repeatedly raised concerns about user privacy.
This story is updating.
