With the U.S. federal government open once again, the temporarily frozen IPO pipeline is finally starting to thaw. One of the bigger IPOs that could happen in 2019 is Pinterest’s, a popular photo-sharing website originally built around the visual metaphor of cork bulletin boards.
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Pinterest has hired bankers for its IPO, according to the Financial Times. The FT reports that “Pinterest has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to advise” it on its impending public offering.
Pinterest has raised over $1.5 billion in outside venture funding to date. Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Investments, and FirstMark, among others.
If you recall from our prior coverage, Pinterest has been a perennial IPO candidate. This could finally be its year. We’ve dug into Pinterest’s growth story before so we won’t bore you with it again, but when the social giant does drop a public filing we’ll be especially interested in the quality of its revenue, the changing pace of its revenue growth, and its operating costs.
While Slack’s blistering path to the public markets is expected to go well (the company is so certain of its impending success that it may pursue a direct listing), Pinterest is more of a question mark. The firm may be in rude health, or it may be just pretty alright.
Whichever is the case, the company earned a roughly $12.3 billion valuation (post-money) in its last round of funding, a $150 million deal inked with Sinai Ventures. This puts Pinterest on the larger side of 2019’s possible IPO candidates, roughly in line with ride-hailing firm Lyft, which also hired JP Morgan to handle its IPO.
Of course, with nothing firmly on the calendar yet, there’s still plenty of uncertainty over when (or if) Pinterest will go public this year.
A chart of Pinterest’s prior rounds was added following initial publication.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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