Snap is planning on submitting public filings for its upcoming IPO late this week, a development first reported by Recode. Although the company previously filed confidentially with the SEC, this will be the first chance for everyone to get an inside look at Snap’s metrics and financials, something the company and CEO Evan Spiegel (right) have been notoriously tight-lipped about.
Snap
Based in the Los Angeles area, Snap is aiming to raise as much as $4 billion in its IPO, according to Bloomberg, and plans to “emphasize its average revenue per user” in the buildup. Murmurs of an offering slated for this quarter have reverberated for months, and a public filing this week would support that timeline. Given the expected length of a road show, it’s likely the IPO—at an expected valuation of $20 billion to $25 billion—will be completed in March.
?
Snap is the parent company of the popular ephemeral messaging app Snapchat and related hardware product Spectacles. While its public offering has long been a buzzworthy topic, excitement increased last week after Cisco swooped in at the last second to purchase AppDynamics for $3.7 billion—a shocking move just days before the company was set to be 2017’s first tech IPO in the US. Many were hoping to gauge investor appetite for tech companies through AppDynamics’ performance, but now eyes turn even more to Snap.
Though some have cautioned conflating Snap’s popularity with how other tech companies might be received. Dan Primack of Axios laid out a few points to that end, one of them being that Snap boasts extremely high user growth, much higher than what other private tech companies are seeing. Snap is also a consumer-focused company, not the best comp for the many enterprise tech startups eyeing an IPO.
Most user metrics for Snap have been provided via leaks, however, so it’s been hard to say for sure what type of growth the company is really experiencing. But with public documents on the way, we’re finally set to see the inner-workings of the secretive company for ourselves.
Read some of our previous Snap coverage or learn more about the company in its free profile.
Article by Mikey Tom, PitchBook
