Reddit goes public: the latest updates on its IPO

The self-styled ‘front page of the internet’ has unplugged third-party apps, spurned defiant mods, and struck AI partnerships in a bid to go public.

After working overtime to remake itself ahead of a renewed pitch to investors, Reddit has filed its intentions to go public with the SEC. The company seeks a $6.5 billion valuation and hopes to raise $748 million on 22 million shares sold at $31 to $34 a pop. As an olive branch to users who haven’t been particularly happy with it, it’s giving them dibs on 1.76 million shares.

Reddit has tried to go public before. But its initial 2021 bid, which saw it possibly valued at $10 billion, fizzled in a then-unstable IPO market. The company then spent 2023 dismantling what CEO Steve Huffman appeared to see as the main obstacle to its ramp to financial success: easy access to Reddit’s data.

In June 2023, the site rolled out pricing changes to its API access that were ostensibly intended to pinch off easy AI data scraping but also created huge costs for developers of third-party apps like Apollo. This sparked a massive site-wide moderator and user protest that sent thousands of its biggest subreddits dark, some for months.

The site steamrolled its way through the protests, fired moderators, and later even threatened to block Google and Bing from indexing it. In February 2024, the company announced a reportedly $60 billion AI training deal that would give Google access to the site’s massive repository of user-generated data, putting the cherry on top of its aggressive 2023 maneuvering.