San Francisco: Online discussion forum Reddit said that it is now valued at more than $10 billion after raising an additional $410 million in funding, with the final round expected to grow to up to $700 million, the media reported.
According to The Verge, the company continues to build and sanitise its business, removing racist, misogynist and otherwise controversial communities, as it prepares to go public at some point in the future.
“We are still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet,” Steve Huffman,Aco-founder and CEO, Reddit, was quoted as saying to The New York Times in an interview.
“All good companies should go public when they can,” Huffman added.
The company previously raised $250 million in funding earlier this year for a valuation of $6 billion.
But Huffman told the Times that the company was approached with this recent financing round by Fidelity Investments and were made “an offer that we couldn’t refuse”.
Reddit makes most of its money from advertising on the site, and although it’s a minnow compared to the likes of Facebook and Google, it’s growing its business quickly, the report said.
The company said it made $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021, up 192 per cent compared to the same period last year.
Though for context, Google made $61.9 billion in this year’s second quarter, mostly from YouTube and Search advertising.
Reddit now has roughly 52 million daily users (compared to 1.85 billion daily Facebook users) and more than 100,000 active sub-reddits. Earlier this year, the company said it planned to double its staff count by the end of 2021 to around 1,400 employees.