Reddit set to raise $150 M from Tencent, nears $3 B valuation
At present, Reddit is the fifth-most visited site in the US, trailing only Google, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon.
Reddit, also known as ‘the front page of the internet’, is nearing a $3 billion valuation following its upcoming fundraise. The social news aggregator is looking to raise $150 million in Series D round led by China’s Tencent, TechCrunch reported.
This fund infusion comes nearly two years after it raised $200 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and others in July 2017. The American social news and entertainment website was then valued at $1.8 billion. It currently has a pre-money valuation of $2.7 billion.
Even though Reddit is yet to turn a profit in more than a decade, it counts 330 million monthly active users and over 150,000 subreddits on its platform.
Last December, Reddit crossed 1.4 billion video views per month, growing a massive 40 percent in two months. The San Francisco-headquartered company also crossed $100 million in revenues in 2018.
Both Reddit and Tencent are yet to issue an official statement on the development.
Reddit was founded in 2005 by entrepreneurs Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, and was owned by Condé Nast from 2006 and 2011, before being spun off as an independent entity. Since then, the company has actively raised venture capital.
CEO Steve Huffman was quoted in the media saying,
"We have a lot of perception debt. Reddit feels old. We don’t want to be associated with old.”
The platform utilised its last funds to hire new talent, redesign its website, and push user-generated videos.
“We want to be more visually appealing… so when new users come, they have a better sense of what’s there, what it’s for,” Huffman said.
Reddit’s popularity is undeniable. Last May, it surpassed Facebook to become the third most-visited site in the US, according to Alexa rankings. At present, it stands at #5 trailing Google, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon. But, in terms of daily minutes per user (11.34), it ranks higher than America’s top 35 sites.
Surely, those cat memes are working!