New funding round sees Reddit gain $4B in valuation since February
Popular social media platform Reddit has gained $4 billion in value since its last funding round earlier this year in February.
Six months ago, the firm raised $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $6 billion.
In the latest move, Reddit announced a Series F funding round on Thursday — which is being led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC and is expected to close at around $700 million with a post-money valuation of $10 billion.
According to the New York Times, investment in the funding round has reached $410 million so far, with Reddit stating that it expects further financing from existing investors to reach the $700 million target.
The true valuation of Reddit is hard to gauge as the firm is yet to go public. On that subject, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, Steve Huffman, said to the Times:
“We are still planning on going public, but we don’t have a firm timeline there yet.”
“All good companies should go public when they can,” he added.
The company will use the latest funds to further international growth, simplify the user experience, improve website functionality and roll out more video and audio features, along with developing a self-service advertising system.
The platform competes with ad-based social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter, with Huffman stating that “we’ve grown up in the shadow of Facebook and Google, and pretty much every dollar we make we’ve had to fight for.”
Unlike Facebook or Google, however, Reddit has already launched its own cryptocurrencies in the form of Reddit Community Points, or RCPs.
The r/CryptoCurrency subreddit, which has 3.3 million members, has its own coin called r/CryptoCurrency Moons (MOON). In January, Cointelegraph reported that one user sold 14,000 Moons they acquired for free to pay their rent.
MOON currently has a higher price than Dogecoin (DOGE). At the time of writing, according to CoinGecko, DOGE is sitting at $0.27 while MOON sits slightly above at $0.29.
The r/FortNite subreddit launched a similar RCP called BRICK.
Reddit is home to notorious memestock group r/wallstreetbets, which has had a significant impact on stock markets and crypto markets this year with its retail trading and pumping antics. The group’s popularity led to the creation of the crypto equivalent in r/SatoshiStreetBets, which now has a community of 480,000 Redditors.
Related: Reddit deploys layer-2 solution aimed at scaling Ethereum-based community points
