Photographer: Gabby Jones / Bloomberg
Photographer: Gabby Jones / Bloomberg
Roblox Corp intends to make itself public through a direct listing rather than an initial public offering as previously planned.
The online gaming company announced the change on Wednesday, confirming a previous Bloomberg report. Roblox also said it raised $ 520 million through a private H-series placement that valued it at $ 29.5 billion, according to a separate document statement. The round was led by Capital Altimeter i Dragoneer Investment Group.
The funding will allow Roblox to go public without having to raise capital on a IPO. Although the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a proposal by the New York Stock Exchange to allow companies to raise capital in a hybrid type of direct listing, no company has yet tested this model.
Only a handful of companies have made direct listings, including Palantir Technologies Inc. by Peter Thiel and the music streaming service Spotify Technology SA. Neither raised any new capital on the list.
Roblox had been working with him Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley i JPMorgan Chase & Co. on the IPO, it plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RBLX.
In December, Roblox told its employees that it was delaying its IPO until 2021 to try to improve the process. The postponement came after surprising gains in the Doordash Inc. listing. and Airbnb Inc.
Make “improvements”
“As such, we decided to take this opportunity to work with our advisors to see how we can make these improvements,” CEO David Baszucki said in an email to employees last year.
Read more: Roblox will delay the IPO when it is said to weigh its time
In a direct listing, a company does not normally raise capital as it would in a IPO and investors do not have to wait for a closing period to expire before selling their shares.
Roblox, based in San Mateo, California, has seen its revenue and user base grow as the coronavirus pandemic kept students at home and in search of entertainment. The company was valued at $ 4 billion in a $ 150 million round of financing in February, led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Roblox hosts millions of games created by its users, who then get a share of the related revenue. He says two-thirds of all U.S. children ages 9 to 12 use the platform.
The company had 31 million daily active users during the first nine months of the year, 82% more than the same period in 2019, according to its previous SEC filings. The amount of time users spent on the platform doubled from last year to 22 billion hours, the company said.
The use of most video games has exploded with the coronavirus pandemic that keeps millions of people (including school-age children) at home with time on their hands.
Birthdays, concerts
Roblox has expanded its focus to become a social platform, where users can come not only to play, but also to attend virtual birthday parties and concerts with friends. Amid school closures, Roblox has also been increasingly used to teach from coding to physics.
During the nine months ended Sept. 30, Roblox lost $ 203 million in revenue of $ 589 million, compared to a loss of $ 46 million in revenue of $ 350 million for the same period of the year. past, according to statements.
Among the company’s investors are Altos Ventures, First Round Capital, Index Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and Tiger Global.
(Updates with user statistics in paragraph 11. The amount of funding was corrected in an earlier version of this story.)