Pinterest Said To Confidentially File For IPO

In news today that surprised not a single person from Wall Street to the streets of SoMA outside its offices, Pinterest reportedly filed to go public, albeit confidentially. The news, reported by the Wall Street Journal, goes slightly further than a simple filing. According to the same Journal report, Pinterest intends to shoot for a valuation of $12 billion, or more.

This is no mere unicorn IPO, in other words. This is a decacorn valuation.

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News broke at the end of January that Pinterest had reportedly hired Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase to underwrite and advise on its initial public offering.

San Francisco-based Pinterest’s long road to the public markets is nearly anticlimactic, now that it has all but publicly arrived. The company was a long-running IPO candidate that, in recent years, fell behind other private companies that saw their valuations rise more quickly. Uber and Slack are prime examples of the type.

But, Pinterest has grown its revenue into the hundreds of millions, expanded its user base also into the nine-figures, all of which supports its eleven-figure valuation. If Pinterest will be able to extend its valuation past the $12 billion mark is an obvious question; if it can’t, it will essentially IPO flat. That’s still better than what Dropbox managed, but, everyone wants a markup when they take on fresh dilution.

Historical Notes

As we charted here before, Pinterest’s valuation rose over time as it accreted more capital to its accounts:

It’s an impressive fundraising record (you can see the same data in Crunchbase here). In total, Pinterest raised $1.5 billion over its life, having been born in 2009. Backers include Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, among many others.

The successive capital events did not spring from rocks, of course. Pinterest has put up impressive growth over time. From this report of ours, here’s what a flurry of media reports over the years compile into when you graph out Pinterest’s revenue and user base over time:

With news still fresh that Lyft could go on a roadshow in short order, and that the ride-hailing company’s S-1 could drop next week, we’re finally off the IPO races.

As we reported earlier today, it’s been something of a dearth thus far.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias