Confirming recent reports, Reddit Inc. today submitted paperwork for a public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company didn’t disclose its fundraising and valuation targets in the regulatory filing. Last Friday, sources told Bloomberg that Reddit’s financial advisers have recommended a valuation of at least $5 billion. The report added that the company may float its shares as early as March, which could make the listing the tech industry’s first major initial public offering of 2024.

Reddit launched in 2005 and was acquired by Condé Nast the following year. In 2013, it became an independent company again through a spinoff. Reddit subsequently raised more than $1 billion in outside capital over several funding rounds.

Today’s IPO filing reveals that Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., the parent company of Condé Nast, is Reddit’s largest investor with a more than 30% stake. Tencent Holdings Ltd., which led a $300 million funding round for the forum operator in 2019, is the second largest shareholder. Less expected is that the IPO filing places OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in third place with an 8.3% stake.

Reddit generated $804 million in revenue last year, a 20% improvement over 2022. The company’s sales momentum is driven primarily by website traffic growth: it added one million average daily active unique users in each of the six months through Dec. 31. Reddit ended 2023 with a total of 73.1 million such users.

The company managed to grow its revenue last year while cutting expenses in parallel. According to the IPO filing, it lost $90.8 million in 2023 compared with $158.6 million the year prior.

Reddit’s plan to maintain revenue growth as a public company places an emphasis on artificial intelligence. Against the backdrop of today’s IPO filing, the forum operator disclosed that it will license the content on its platform to Google LLC for use in AI development projects. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Reddit had inked a content licensing deal worth at least $60 million annually with an unnamed “large AI company.”

As part of the partnership, Reddit will also use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI suite of machine learning services to enhance its platform’s built-in search tool. The forum operator disclosed in its IPO paperwork that it plans to monetize the tool with embedded ads. “As we continue to build out our search capabilities, we believe we can more fully address the $750 billion opportunity in search advertising,” the company stated.

Reddit plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are the lead underwriters for the IPO with support from more than a dozen other banks. 

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