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SAN FRANCISCO – According to two people familiar with the decision, Pinterest has classified confidential documents for publication, joining a rush of top-level start-ups to public markets.
The company, which has an app and a website allowing users to save images and links to virtual bulletin boards, filed its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early February, officials said. They asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to publicly discuss the deposit.
Private market investors valued Pinterest at $ 12 billion. In September, the business figure is expected to reach $ 700 million last year, an increase of 50% over 2017. At the time, the company had $ 250 million in revenue. # 39; active users per month.
Mike Mayzel, a spokesperson for Pinterest, declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal had previously reported that Pinterest had filed the documents with regulators.
The rush for initial public offerings of high-value companies in Silicon Valley has intensified in recent weeks. Lyft is is preparing to start trading at the end of April. His rival, Uber, filed his first papers with the S.E.C. last year, should follow. Investment bankers have estimated that Uber could rise to $ 120 billion in the public market.
Slack, an office messaging applications company, has also asked to be made public. The company was valued at $ 7.1 billion by private investors. Postmates, a food delivery application worth nearly $ 2 billion, has also filed confidential documents to be made public.
Pinterest has a lot of cash: it has raised about $ 1.5 billion in venture capital funds and has been close to profitability in the past. But we do not know how investors will perceive the company, which earns revenue from online advertising and competes with Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and Snap to gain market share.
The company is unusual in Silicon Valley for avoiding hype and media coverage. This reluctance has frustrated some investors and some executives, resulting in a turnover of leaders in recent years.
But others consider Pinterest's reserved, slow and steady approach as the reason for its success. Unlike its social media counterparts such as Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has taken bold steps to eliminate the potentially damaging misinformation of its platform. The company recently removed the results of the vaccine-related content search to prevent the spread of fake memes and anti-vaccination information.
Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra founded Pinterest in 2010. The company's growth took off soon after, especially among midwestern women.
In recent years, user growth has slowed, but CEO Silbermann has weathered Silicon Valley's usual pitfalls to extract numbers in the near term, focusing on what he calls "growth." quality".
"It's natural that you can grow a healthy business," he told The New York Times last year.
A year ago, the company hired Françoise Brougher as director of operations, which many people in the industry saw as a sign that Pinterest was soon going to exploit public markets. Ms. Brougher helped make Square, the payment company, public in 2015.
In November, in a sign of willingness to promote itself more than in the past, the company hired Andrea Mallard, former marketing agent of Athleta brand of Gap Inc., as marketing director.
Some of the companies in this generation of start-ups plan to make non-traditional public offerings called direct listings.
In a direct list, companies do not go on I.P.O. "Road shows" to present their shares to potential investors, neither to issue new shares nor to organize sales of shares before listing. This avoids blocking periods when a stock is put on the market for the first time. During this period, insiders can not sell their shares.
This option is attractive for companies that do not need to rely on public markets to get more money. It has attracted the interest of young, high-value companies that have mobilized billions of private investors.
Spotify, the streaming music company, had a successful direct list last year. Soft plans to follow in his footsteps with a similar transaction in the coming months.
But Pinterest plans to pursue an Ip.O. traditional, said one of the people familiar with the situation.
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