Pinterest joins wave of upcoming unicorn IPOs

Pinterest Inc., the digital-scrapbooking and image-search site, filed for an initial public offering Friday amid a burst of activity among soon-to-list technology-related companies in the United States.

Pinterest plans to list its shares as soon as April, a person familiar with the matter said Thursday.

The proposed terms of the share sale won’t be disclosed until a later filing, but people familiar with the matter have said the San Francisco company could raise about $1.5 billion in an IPO valuing it at $12 billion or more.

Pinterest applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “PINS.” Pinterest will have a dual-class structure, with its Class B shares carrying the voting rights of 20 ordinary shares. The share sale will be led by banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Allen & Co., according to the filing Friday.

Pinterest raised $150 million in a private funding round in 2017 for a total valuation of about $12.3 billion. It confidentially shared its IPO plans with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

The company has experienced “significant growth” in users and monetization over the last several years, it said in the filing. It also said it has grown quickly in international markets by localizing content.

It reported a loss of $63 million on revenue of $756 million in 2018, compared with a loss of $130 million on revenue of $473 million in 2017.

Founded in 2010, Pinterest is among the longest-lived of Silicon Valley’s unicorns — start-ups with a valuation of more than $1 billion — that are lining up to go public this year or soon after.

Lyft Inc.’s IPO, in which the ride-hailing company is seeking to raise $2.1 billion, is set for March 28. Its larger rival Uber Technologies Inc. is expected to submit its public filing in April for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange that could value it at as much as $120 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.

Other tech and app-driven companies that are considering listing this year include food delivery company Postmates Inc. and messaging-platform firm Slack Technologies Inc.