Advertising technology platform The Trade Desk Inc. has filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TTD.”

Serving as underwriters for the initial public offering (IPO) are Citigroup, Jefferies, and RBC who will be assisting the company in raising $86.3 million.

Founded in 2009, The Trade Desk offers a self-service platform that enables ad buyers to manage data-driven advertising campaigns across various advertising formats, including display, video, and social, and on a multitude of devices, including computers, mobile devices, and connected TV.

The company claims to have become the fastest growing, demand-side platform in the industry by offering agencies, aggregators, and their advertisers best-in-class technology to manage display, social, mobile, and video advertising campaigns.

According to The Trade Desk’s S1 filing, the company reported revenue of $113.8 million in 2015, on gross billings of $530 million, with earnings before income tax coming in at $39.2 million for the year.

The numbers for the first six months of 2016 looked brighter, with revenue of $77.6 million, up 83 percent year on year.

Clients, which include ad networks offering new services in real-time bidding (RTB), data owners looking to leverage their information, agency trading desks, to “the most sophisticated buyers in RTB” totaled 389 at the end of 2015.

Demonstrating the diversification of ad spending, The Trade Desk said its clients had gone from a gross spend of 100 percent into display advertising in 2011 to 57 percent in 2015, with the remaining 43 percent being allocated to mobile, video, and social channels.

Positive sign

The move by The Trade Desk to go public comes as a positive sign for both the tech market and online advertising market, with AdExchanger noting that it “will come as welcome news to many ad tech companies, both private and public, which have seen their valuations stagnate or decline in recent years.”

As SiliconANGLE noted when covering The Trade Desk back in 2011, the company uses Big Data to power its real-time bidding platform so the float also has implications for the broader technology sector, particularly after a lull in IPOs in the first half of this year.

Going into the IPO, The Trade Desk had raised $82.5 million in traditional venture capital and $125 million in debt financing from firms including Bridge Bank, Double M Partners, Founder Collective, Hermes Growth Partners, IA Ventures, Kortschak Investments, Neu Venture Capital, Opus Bank, Revel Partners, SV Angel, Wellington Management, and Wider Wake Networks.

Image credit: The Trade Desk