Anthony Casalena, Founder and CEO, Squarespace
Source: Squarespace
Squarespace, which makes software for people to build websites, was submitted Friday to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SQSP”.
The company has a traditional initial public offering, where it would issue new shares to institutional investors to raise new capital, and instead use a direct listing, where it sells existing shares on the public market to liquidate former investors and employees. to get. This mechanism has become increasingly popular, with technology companies Slack, Spotify, Palantir, Roblox and Coinbase opting for direct listings over the past few years. Last month, Squarespace raised $ 300 million in funding.
The company reported $ 621.1 million in revenue in 2020, with revenue up 28% year-on-year. Squarespace wants to grow its business by attracting new customers and getting existing customers to use more of their services, including tools to sell products online.
Squarespace had more than 3.6 million subscriptions at the end of the year, up about 23%.
Instead of pursuing large businesses, Squarespace focuses on self-employed people and small businesses. New York-based cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean is also focusing on smaller units for growth.
The competition includes Automattic, Wix, Weebly, as well as domain registration companies such as GoDaddy and e-commerce companies such as Shopify and BigCommerce.
Squarespace was founded in 2003 and was based in New York at the end of 2020 with 1,256 employees.
Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, will control the majority of Squarespace’s voting power. Squarespace sells Class A shares of its shares, each receiving one vote, and Casalena owns the vast majority of the company’s Class B shares, each receiving 10 votes.
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