Coverage: Pinterest plans to raise $1.2 billion in an IPO

Pinterest Inc. set a price range of $15 to $17 for its initial public offering, a range that is below where it last raised money privately, as the image-search company begins its roadshow to pitch the shares to investors Monday.

Maureen Farrell of The Wall Street Journal had the news:

The company said it plans to sell up to 75 million shares in the IPO, which at the midpoint of the price range would raise roughly $1.2 billion.

Pinterest last sold shares to pre-IPO investors in 2017 at a price of $21.54 each, valuing the company at roughly $12 billion. At the proposed price range, Pinterest would be valued below that level.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Pinterest’s IPO price range would fall below where it last raised money privately.

There is no guarantee that IPO shares will ultimately be priced within the initial range, and underwriters typically seek to set conservative expectations with the hope that they can exceed them when the shares are sold. Pinterest’s shares are expected to start trading next week on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PINS.

Chris Isidore and Seth Fiegerman of CNN business reported that Pinterest has 250 million monthly users:

The company was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, the last of whom parted ways with the company early in its history. Over the years, Pinterest has tried to evolve from being a digital scrapbooking service to a visual discovery tool, positioning it as a potential competitor to products like Google Search.

More than 250 million people now use Pinterest each month to bookmark or “pin” images ranging from recipes to home designs. While it’s an impressive figure by many standards, it falls well behind other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which measure their audience in billions.

Unlike Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR) and Snapchat, Pinterest is not disclosing the number of people who use its service on a daily basis, which could raise concerns about user engagement. “We do not anticipate that most of our users will become daily active users,” the company said in its IPO prospectus.

Brian Deagon of Investor’s Business Daily reports that the stock will start trading later this month:

Pinterest expects to begin trading sometime this month on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PINS. It’s a website where users post and share photos, charts and other images covering a wide range of categories and interests.

The San Francisco-based company reaches more than 250 million monthly active users, of which two-thirds of are female.

“They come to discover ideas for just about anything you can imagine: daily activities like cooking dinner or deciding what to wear, major commitments like remodeling a house or training for a marathon, ongoing passions like fly fishing or fashion and milestone events like planning a wedding or a dream vacation,” said the Pinterest IPO filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It’s also one of several tech “unicorns,” or companies with an estimated market valuation above $1 billion due to go public. Another is Uber Technologies, which expects to begin trading this month. Its main competitor, Lyft, held its IPO last week, kicking off what’s expected to be a busy IPO period for unicorns.