Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena.
Square space
Squarespace, which makes software for people to create websites, filed Friday to make it public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SQSP”.
The company shuns a traditional initial public offering, where it would issue new shares to institutional investors to raise new capital and, instead, would trade directly, where it sells existing shares in the public market to allow investors and former employees to obtain liquidity. This mechanism has become increasingly popular, with technology companies Slack, Spotify, Palantir, Roblox and Coinbase having chosen direct listings in recent years. Last month, Squarespace raised $ 300 million.
The company reported revenue of $ 621.1 million in 2020, with revenue up 28% year-over-year. Squarespace wants to grow its business by enrolling new customers and getting existing customers to use more of its services, including tools to sell products online.
Squarespace had more than 3.6 million subscriptions at the end of the year, up 23%.
Instead of looking for large companies, Squarespace focuses on the self-employed and small businesses. DigitalOcean, a New York-based cloud infrastructure provider, is also focusing on smaller entities for its growth.
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 is headquartered in New York, with 1,256 employees by the end of 2020.
Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace, will control most of Squarespace’s voting power. Squarespace sells Class A shares of its shares, each of which gets one vote, and Casalena owns the vast majority of the company’s Class B shares, which get 10 votes each.
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