Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena.
Squarespace
Squarespace, which makes software that allows people to build websites, filed on Friday to be made public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ‘SQSP’.
The company shuns a traditional IPO, where it would issue new shares to institutional investors to raise new capital, and instead uses a direct listing, where it sells existing shares in the public market to give previous investors and employees liquidity. That mechanism has become increasingly popular, with tech companies Slack, Spotify, Palantir, Roblox and Coinbase all opting for direct offers in recent years. Last month, Squarespace raised $ 300 million in funding.
The company reported revenue of $ 621.1 million in 2020, with revenue growth of 28% year over year. Squarespace wants to grow its business by attracting new customers and getting existing customers to use more of its services, including tools for selling products online.
Squarespace had more than 3.6 million subscriptions at the end of the year, an increase of about 23%.
Rather than chasing large corporations, Squarespace focuses on the self-employed and small businesses. New York-based cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean is also targeting smaller entities for growth.
Competition includes Automattic, Wix, Weebly, as well as domain registration companies such as GoDaddy and ecommerce companies such as Shopify and BigCommerce.
Founded in 2003, Squarespace is based in New York, with 1,256 employees by the end of 2020.
Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, will control the majority of Squarespace’s voting rights. Squarespace sells Class A shares of its shares, each of which will receive one vote, and Casalena owns the vast majority of the Company’s Class B shares, each of which will receive 10 votes.
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