SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest confidentially filed paperwork to go public, according to two people familiar with the decision, joining a stampede of high-profile start-ups heading toward the public markets.
The company, which has an app and a website that allow people to save images and links to virtual pin boards, filed its paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early February, the people said. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the filing publicly.
Private market investors have valued Pinterest at $12 billion. In September, it was expected to top $700 million in revenue last year, a 50 percent increase from 2017. At the time, it had 250 million monthly active users.
Mike Mayzel, a Pinterest spokesman, declined to comment.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that Pinterest had filed the paperwork with regulators.
The stampede of initial public offerings by highly valued Silicon Valley companies has intensified in recent weeks. Lyft is preparing to begin trading its shares in late April. Its ride-hailing rival, Uber, which filed its initial paperwork with the S.E.C. last year, is expected to follow. Investment bankers have estimated that Uber could be worth $120 billion on the public market.
Slack, an office messaging app company, has also filed to go public. The company was last valued at $7.1 billion by private investors. Postmates, a food delivery app worth nearly $2 billion, has also filed confidential paperwork to go public.
Pinterest has plenty of cash: It raised around $1.5 billion in venture capital funding and has come close to profitability in the past. But it is unclear how investors will view the company, which makes money from online advertising and competes against Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and Snap for market share.
The company is unusual in Silicon Valley for its avoidance of hype and media coverage. That reluctance has frustrated some investors and executives, leading to executive turnover in recent years.
But others view Pinterest’s reserved, slow and steady approach as the reason for its success. In contrast to its social media peers like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has taken bold steps to eradicate potentially harmful disinformation from its platform. The company recently removed search results for content related to vaccines to prevent false anti-vaccination memes and information from spreading.
Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra founded Pinterest in 2010. The company’s growth took off soon after, particularly among Midwestern women.
In recent years, user growth had slowed, but Mr. Silbermann, the chief executive, resisted Silicon Valley’s typical tricks for juicing the numbers in the short term, favoring what he called “quality growth.”
“There’s a natural rate at which you can scale a company that’s healthy,” he told The New York Times last year.
A year ago, the company hired Francoise Brougher as its chief operating officer, a move that many people in the industry saw as a sign that Pinterest would soon tap the public markets. Ms. Brougher helped take Square, the payments company, public in 2015.
In November, in a sign that it wanted to promote itself more than it had in the past, the company hired Andréa Mallard, formerly a marketer at Gap Inc.’s Athleta brand, as its chief marketing officer.
Some of the companies from this generation of start-ups plan to do nontraditional public offerings called direct listings.
In a direct listing, companies do not go on I.P.O. “road shows” to pitch their stock to potential investors, nor do they issue new shares or arrange stock sales in advance of the listing. This avoids lockup periods when a stock first goes on the market. During that period, insiders cannot sell their stock.
The option is attractive for companies that have no need to tap the public markets for more money. It has piqued the interest of highly valued start-ups that have raised billions from private market investors.
Spotify, the music streaming company, had a successful direct listing last year. Slack plans to follow in its footsteps with a similar transaction in the coming months.
But Pinterest plans to pursue a traditional I.P.O., one of the people familiar with the situation said.
Erin Griffith reports on technology start-ups and venture capital from the San Francisco bureau. Before joining The Times she was a senior writer at WIRED and Fortune. @eringriffith
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