IPOs this week : Apr 15 - 19, 24 (wk 16)

IPOs expected to price

• Utility infrastructure services provider Centuri Holdings (CTRI) and 
• mobile tech firm Ibotta (IBTA). 

IPO quiet period expirations

• Astera Labs (ALAB), 
• Reddit (NYSE:RDDT), and 
• Auna (AUNA)

IPO lockup expirations

• Webuy Global (WBUY) and 
• CytoMed Therapeutics (GDTC)

Reddit files for IPO

Social-media platform Reddit — the home of AMAs, Wall Street Bets and thousands of other online communities — publicly filed its registration statement for an IPO on Thursday, detailing plans to push further into advertising, data sales and analytics, and what it called its budding user-driven economy.

The company, founded in 2005, plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” The filing did not disclose the number of shares to be offered or their potential price.

Reddit's US IPO filing reveals $90.8 million losses, 21% revenue growth in 2023

(Reuters) -Reddit disclosed on Thursday that its net loss narrowed to $90.8 million and revenue growth was roughly 21% in 2023, as the social media company made its IPO filing public in the run-up to its highly anticipated planned U.S. stock market debut in March.

The initial public offering (IPO) filing comes almost two decades after Reddit's launch and will be a major test for the platform that still lags the commercial success of social media contemporaries such as Facebook and Twitter, now known as X.

Reddit said it had an average of 73.1 million daily active users and 267.5 million weekly active users in the three months ended Dec. 31, 2023. The company said over 100,000 active communities used its platform, which had 1 billion cumulative posts.

In the IPO filing, Reddit reported a narrower net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31 and logged revenue growth of $804 million, up from $666.7 million a year earlier.

Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources, that San Francisco-based Reddit has struck a deal with Alphabet's Google to make its content available to train the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models. The contract is worth about $60 million each year, according to one of the sources.

Reddit files confidentially for IPO

Reddit, the social-media platform that is home to WallStreetBets and other forums, confidentially has filed for an initial public offering.

• The company, founded in San Francisco in 2005, as of August had a valuation of about $10 billion.
• Along with Fidelity, Reddit’s investors include venture-capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd.
• Reddit said that it had more than 52 million daily active users as of January, spanning 100,000-plus online communities. Its most notorious community is 10.8 million user-strong WallStreetBets, which was at the heart of a trading frenzy earlier this year in stocks such as GameStop (ticker: GME) and AMC Entertainment (AMC).

In recent years, Reddit has been taking steps to grow by investing in areas such as video and consumer products, as well as by moving into international markets. But like many other social-media companies, it’s also been plagued with content-moderation challenges, including how to stop the spread of misinformation and calls for violence.

As of August, Reddit said it had a valuation of about $10 billion after raising more than $400 million from Fidelity Investments Inc. In February, the social-media company said it had raised about $500 million at a $6.5 billion valuation.

Reddit has been looking to build on the attention it gained when at the start of the year its WallStreetBets forum became a hot spot for the individual investors who rallied around GameStop Corp. and other stocks.

The episode brought in millions of new users, Reddit Chief Executive Steve Huffman said in its wake, as well as new advertisers, the source of the bulk of the company’s revenue. He has also said that with an IPO, he would want to make Reddit’s share offering more accessible to individual investors.

San Francisco-based Reddit, founded in 2005, is known for its message boards on an array of topics, plus its “ask me anything” digital town halls with celebrities, politicians and subject-matter experts. The company was sold to Condé Nast in 2006, and the magazine publisher’s parent, Advance Publications Inc., spun Reddit off in 2011 and remains a shareholder.

Over time, Reddit has grown to outpace rivals such as Digg to become a haven for niche communities to gather and a go-to source of news. Reddit had more than 50 million daily users as of January, according to its website. The company aired its first Super Bowl ad the following month and in August it said it reached $100 million in advertising revenue in a quarter for the first time, almost triple the prior-year figure but that it remained unprofitable.