Twitter, Inc. announced on Thursday that the company has filed a confidential (i.e. secret) filing with the SEC to go public. The company has been valued at US$10 billion, but so far Twitter has not announced what kind of valuation it will shoot for in its initial public offering (IPO).
Fittingly, Twitter made the announcement via Twitter, tweeting:
We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.
— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013
It's confidential, so don't tell anyone…
According to CNBC, Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter on the IPO, though other underwriters will be included when Twitter's S-1 filing is made public at some point in the future.
The network also noted that a company has to have less than $1 billion in revenue in order to file in secret, as Twitter did. This is a provision of the JOBS Act (not relating to Steve Jobs, just FYI), and it is intended to allow companies time to work with regulators before exposing their IPO to public scrutiny.
Twitter has raised well over a billion dollars in funding over the years, including a massive round of $800 million in one go in 2011 through Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies, and that's on top of the $200 million raised the year before and numerous rounds of smaller funding before that.
It's unclear how many of those funders will want to cash out, but with such huge venture capital funding, Twitter's IPO could easily float a billion dollars worth of stock within that valuation somewhere in the $10 billion range.
Good times.