Pinterest prices IPO at $19 per share, giving it a $10 billion valuation — lower than its $12.3 billion private valuation

Ben Silbermann

Pinterest priced its IPO at $19 a share on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of $10 billion.
It's above the range the company originally set for its IPO, though still below its last private funding valuation of $12.3 billion.
Pinterest is expected to start trading on Thursday on NYSE under the ticker symbol "PINS."

Pinterest, the self-described "visual discovery" platform, priced its IPO at $19 a share on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of $10 billion.

The company is expected to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the ticker symbol "PINS." It's joined by another multi-billion dollar unicorn — Zoom, the video conferencing platform, which is also expected to list on Nasdaq on Thursday under the ticker symbol "ZM."

Pinterest's IPO price is above the $15 to $17 range previously set by the company in a filing on April 8. At the high end of that range, Pinterest would have been valued at $9 billion.

A $10 billion undiluted valuation would see Pinterest go public with a market cap well below the private valuation of $12.3 billion it had achieved in its last funding round. However, in a best-case scenario, Pinterest would be valued at $12.6 billion on a fully-diluted basis, putting it a hair above that last valuation.

In the roadshow leading up to Wednesday night's pricing, Pinterest and its IPO team took pains to differentiate itself from other social media platforms, including Snap, which has struggled to please investors since going public in 2017, a person familiar with the process told Business Insider.

Pinterest's team compared the company to an earlier version of Google, except that its search engine is focused around images, not words.

Pinterest generated $755.9 million in revenue in 2018, up 60% from $472.9 million in 2017. The company lost $63 million in 2018, down from $130 million in losses in 2017, according to its S-1.

In 2018, Pinterest's global average revenue per user was $3.14, up 25% from 2017. In the US, its 2018 ARPU was $9.04, and internationally it was just $0.25. ARPU is a common metric from measuring growth at ad-based businesses.

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