REDDIT and its investors disclosed further details of what is set to be one of the year’s biggest initial public offerings in which they are seeking to raise as much as US$748 million.

The social media platform said in a filing on Monday (Mar 11) that it and its investors are planning to sell 22 million shares for US$31 to US$34 each. About 15.3 million those shares will be sold by the company and the rest by investors and Reddit employees.

At the top of that range, Reddit, whose users helped create the meme stock frenzy of 2021, would have a market value of US$5.4 billion, based on an expected 158.98 million shares outstanding.

About 8 per cent of the shares in the IPO are being set aside for Reddit users and moderators who created accounts before Jan 1, as well as some board members and friends and family of some employees and directors. Those shares won’t be subject to a lockup, meaning the owners can sell them on the opening day of trading, according to Reddit’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that confirms an earlier report by Bloomberg News.

The IPO is being led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America Corp, according to Reddit’s filings. The company plans for its shares to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RDDT.

Reddit’s valuation

Reddit’s more than two-year slog to listing reflects the ups and downs of the market, beginning with its initial confidential filing in 2021, when IPOs on US exchanges set an an all-time record of US$339 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Reddit raised funds that year valuing it at US$10 billion, and Bloomberg News reported the following year that it could be valued at as much as US$15 billion in an IPO.

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Meanwhile, IPOs in the US tumbled, reaching only US$26 billion last year, the data show. In January, Bloomberg News reported that Reddit was weighing feedback from early meetings with potential IPO investors that it should consider a valuation of at least US$5 billion.

The company is a high-profile addition to the year’s roster of newly and soon-to-be public companies. The biggest of those listings was the US$1.57 billion offering by Amer Sports in January. Astera Labs, a software maker focused on artificial intelligence, said in a filing on Friday that it would seek up to US$534 million in its IPO, which will likely proceed Reddit’s.

Reddit’s listing will be watched closely by IPO candidates such as Microsoft Corp-backed data security start up Rubrik and health-care payments company Waystar Technologies Their deliberations come after a quartet of US listings led by semiconductor designer Arm Holdings’s US$5.23 billion offering in September failed to ignite a lasting rebound in the market.

Shrinking losses

Founded in 2005, Reddit averaged 73.1 million daily active unique visitors in the fourth quarter, according to its filings. The company reported a net loss of US$91 million on revenue of US$804 million in 2023, compared with a net loss of about US$159 million on revenue of US$667 million a year earlier.

Reddit’s largest shareholder is Advance Magazine Publishers, part of the Newhouse family publishing empire that owns Conde Nast, which bought Reddit in 2006 and spun it out in 2011.

Reddit said its millions of loyal users and moderators pose risks as well as a benefit for the company. Redditors have a historically combative relationship with the site, launching revolts over everything from racism on the platform to executives’ staffing decisions.

Meme stocks

Thousands of members of the WallStreetBets forum – which boasts around 15 million users and helped popularise meme stocks like GameStop – voted to boost a forum post about shorting Reddit’s stock when it begins trading. Their reasons varied from the company’s lack of profitability to competitive concerns.

Reddit co-founder and chief executive officer Steven Huffman said in a signed letter included in the filings that the company has many opportunities to grow both the platform and the business.

“Advertising is our first business, and advertisers of all sizes have discovered that Reddit is a great place to find high-intent customers that they aren’t able to reach elsewhere,” Huffman said. “Advertising on Reddit is rapidly evolving, and we are still in the early phases of growing this business.”

AI licensing

Reddit said it’s in the early stages of allowing third parties to licence access to data on the platform, including to train artificial intelligence models. The company said that in January it entered into data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of US$203 million and terms ranging from two to three years. It expects a minimum of US$66.4 million of revenue from those agreements this year, according to the filings.

Reddit also has announced a deal with Alphabet’s Google, allowing Google’s AI products to use Reddit data to improve their technology. Large language models often need vast troves of human-generated content to improve.

Huffman owns shares that will give him 3.3 per cent of the voting power after the offering. That includes Class B shares that will have 10 votes each compared with one each for the Class A shares to be sold in the IPO, the filings show. Huffman also has a voting proxy agreement with Advance.

Other large shareholders include chief operating officer Jennifer Wong, as well as FMR and entities affiliated with OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman, Tencent Holdings, Vy Capital and Quiet Capital and Tacit Capital, according to the filings.

Huffman’s fellow co-founder, venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian, isn’t listed among the investors with stakes of 5 per cent or more and isn’t named elsewhere in the filings. BLOOMBERG