Reddit priced its stock on Wednesday at $34 a share, the top of the anticipated range, a signal that investors are excited about the company’s IPO on Thursday. The social media giant raised nearly $500 million in the offering.
Excluding employee stock options, the 19-year old company’s valuation will start at $5.4 billion, a far cry from its last private market value of $10 billion, set in August 2021, the top of the last tech markets boom.
The stock, which is the most anticipated offering of the year so far, will debut on New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the ticker symbol “RDDT.”
If Reddit’s stock jumps on its first day of trading, other VC-backed companies waiting in the wings will surely launch their IPO processes shortly after.
Astera Labs, which offers connectivity hardware for data computing data centers, popped 72% on its first day of trading on Wednesday, a strong sign that public markets are ready for new publicly traded companies.
Despite being profitable on EBITDA basis, Instacart and Klaviyo, two main IPOs of 2023, had lukewarm receptions on Wall Street last year.
But Reddit is still generating net losses of more than $90 million, which may bode poorly for the company’s stock amid push for profitability for newly traded companies.
However, investors may consider Reddit’s participation in the AI boom attractive. The company has recently begun to sell its data to Google for training AI models and there may be more similar licensing agreements in the making, which could become a big revenue growth channel for the business. The firm sold $203 million worth of contracts to AI companies for access to its data in January, according to a recent filing.