Pinterest reportedly files for IPO

It looks like Pinterest is going public. The visual discovery engine confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company is believed to seek a valuation of roughly $12 billion with a late June listing.

The news doesn’t come of much of a surprise: Pinterest raised $1.5 billion in funding, and, according to CNBC, was on track to earn $1 billion in revenue last year. The bookmarking platform, which sees 250 million users a month, has become a way for people to express interest across a multitude of categories, from shopping ideas to parenting to gardening.

Pinterest joins a list of other tech companies which have filed paperwork of late, including Lyft, Slack, and Postmates, while others such as Peloton are rumored to be next.

Fast Company just named Pinterest as a 2019 Most Innovative Company in the Beauty category. Every month, the platform processes hundreds of millions of image searches in its bid to help users find things they’re most interested in. To better serve diversity, the visual discovery engine leveraged AI and user recommendations to develop an algorithm for people to search beauty images by skin tone ranges and hair colors. It’s one of many ways Pinterest enables AI to better serve its users.

“The lasting impact of visual search won’t be any specific product or feature,” Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp previously told Fast Company, “rather what it enables people to do: turn anything they see into something they can use to discover more on the internet.”