Reddit goes public with confidential IPO filing

Reuters Videos
Updated

Reddit, the social media message board that helped fuel the meme stock craze earlier this year, is ready to jump on the stock market bandwagon.

The company confidentially filed for an initial public offering this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a post on Reddit’s Twitter account.

Reddit was hoping to hit a valuation of more than $15 billion by the time it issued the filing, according to a Reuters report back in September, when the idea of an IPO started circulating.

Reddit's value doubled back in February when the so-called meme trading frenzy was at its peak. Small investors used Reddit's message board WallStreetBets to gang-up and put the squeeze on professional traders who had large bets against popular names such as GameStop and AMC.

By August its value rose to $10 billion in a private fundraising round.

But even at that value, Reddit pales in comparison to two well-known peers also created around the same time. Twitter, which has a market value of about $35 billion had more than 200 million monetizable daily active users as of its last earnings filing. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which comes in with a $1 trillion market value - had nearly 2 billion daily active users as of the same period.

Of course, one of the topics on Reddit's WallStreetBets Thursday was the Reddit IPO, with one thread getting nearly 6,000 reactions by mid-day.