Pinterest, the nearly decade-old visual search engine, has unveiled its S-1 as it prepares for an initial public offering expected in April.
The paperwork emerged just hours after another tech unicorn, Zoom, filed to go public, too.
Pinterest, valued at $12.3 billion in 2017, took its first official step toward a 2019 IPO, hiring Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters for its big offering.
The San Francisco-based company posted revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31, 2018, up from $472.8 million in 2017. It has roughly doubled its monthly active user count since early 2016, hitting 265 million this year.
Pinterest has raised around $1.5 billion in venture capital funding, listing both early- and late-stage investors on its cap table. The company’s key stakeholders include Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity and Valiant Capital Partners.
Pinterest counts 250 million monthly active users and brought in some $700 million in ad revenue in 2018, per reports, a 50 percent increase year-over-year. The business employs 1,600 people across 13 cities, including Chicago, London, Paris, São Paulo, Berlin and Tokyo.
Several billion-dollar tech companies have made the choice to go public in 2019, even after a weeks-long government shutdown caused a significant delay in IPOs. Pinterest follows Lyft, which unveiled its S-1 and nearly $1 billion in 2018 losses just three weeks ago. Uber and Slack are both expected to make their IPO paperwork available to the public soon.
Pinterest may be looking to benefit of the IPO hype spearheaded by Uber and Lyft though The Information has previously reported the offering could suffer because it’s a social media business, which means it is often compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, a pair of companies that have repeatedly raised concerns about user privacy.
This story is updating.
