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The front page of the internet is going public.
Reddit revealed on Wednesday night that it has filed for an IPO, news that comes a few months after Reuters reported the company was planning a Wall Street debut at a potential $15 billion valuation.
Reddit is ready for its Wall Street close-up.
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The filing will remain confidential for now, and details on the planned listing are scarce. But we don’t need the details to know that this will be a closely watched and long-awaited debut for a company that’s been a fixture in venture capital circles since the second Bush administration. After 16 years and more than $1.3 billion in funding as a private company, Reddit will finally join fellow social media giants like Twitter, Snap and Pinterest as a public one. And after a year in which the /r/WallStreetBets subreddit became a phenomenon and helped spur a frenzy of retail trading, Reddit will soon join that frenzy itself.
There won’t be many notable IPOs between now and the end of the year. But the pipeline for 2022 is looking packed. And it filled up even more this week, as Reddit wasn’t the only major name to make moves toward the public market.
Famed private equity firm TPG also filed for an IPO, this time with a prospectus that’s publicly available. The document shows how the firm has continued to build on an already impressive base in recent years, growing its assets under management from $60 billion in 2016 to $109 billion at the end of this September. It now has five distinct investment platforms with at least $10 billion in AUM, including $52.6 billion in its flagship TPG Capital buyout business, an array of offerings that demonstrates how the private equity industry has matured since TPG got its start in 1992.
Speculation has swirled for years that TPG might make the move from private firm to public entity, following in the footsteps of rivals like Blackstone (which went public in 2007), KKR (2010) and The Carlyle Group (2012). The recent performance of those firms is surely one reason TPG decided to take the leap. Private equity stocks have soared this year, with a huge volume of deals driving huge profits. Carlyle stock is up 67% since the beginning of January, while KKR is up 81%.
It’s a trend that’s already caused a few different private equity investors to go public on the other side of the Atlantic. The U.K.’s Bridgepoint and France’s Antin Infrastructure Partners both conducted IPOs earlier this year. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, conducted a listing in London for its Petershill Partners unit, which holds minority GP stakes in more than a dozen other private equity firms.
TPG appears to be next in line.
This one might be farther in the distance, but delivery startup Gopuff has begun planning an IPO of its own that could occur in the second half of 2022, according to Bloomberg. To call the company’s recent growth explosive would be to undersell it: Gopuff was valued at $190 million in 2017, $1 billion in 2018, $2.2 billion in 2019, $3.9 billion in 2020 and $15 billion with a new round of funding this July, per PitchBook. And that number could continue to shoot up. Axios reported this week that Gopuff issued a $1.5 billion convertible note led by Guggenheim Partners that could value the company at as much as $40 billion.
Based in Philadelphia, Gopuff is a different kind of delivery company than the likes of DoorDash and Instacart, relying on a network of hundreds of its own small fulfillment centers to house goods rather than buying from other restaurants and grocery stores. But Gopuff has benefited from changing consumer tastes amid the pandemic in the same ways that DoorDash and Instacart have—which goes a long way toward explaining its new status as one of America’s most valuable startups.
The broader IPO market has cooled down in recent weeks from its prior incendiary state, with fewer listings going off and fewer enormous first-week gains. But dealmakers across the financial industry expect things to heat back up in 2022. And the planned listings of Reddit, TPG and Gopuff will only add fuel to the fire.