Square has filed to go public.
The payments company, which was co-founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009, has been rumored to be planing a public offering for some time. Now it has filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Square will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the “SQ” symbol. The NYSE became popular among tech companies looking to go public in 2013, after Nasdaq was widely perceived to have bungled Facebook’s public offering.
Jack Dorsey serves as the company’s chief executive. He was also recently named the full-time CEO at Twitter, the other company he co-founded, and Square says that Dorsey’s split attention could be a risk factor in the S-1 filing.
Dorsey explains his commitment to Square in a letter included in the filing:
I believe so much in the potential of this company to drive positive impact in my lifetime that over the past two years I have given over 15 million shares, or 20% of my own equity, back to both Square and the Start Small Foundation, a new organization I created to meaningfully invest in the folks who inspire us: artists, musicians, and local businesses, with a special focus on underserved communities around the world. The shares being made available for the directed share program in this offering are being sold by the Start Small Foundation, giving Square customers the ability to buy equity to support the Foundation. I have also committed to give 40 million more of my shares, an additional 10% of the company, to invest in this cause. I’d rather have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small.
Fusion notes that even as Square’s revenues grew by $298 million between 2013 and 2014, its losses also grew by $50 million in the same period. (It drew $561 million in revenues in the first half of 2015 and lost $78 million in that time.)
Previous reports indicate that Square plans to go complete its initial public offering by the end of this year. The company has not yet revealed its initial price range, nor how many of its shares it plans to sell in the offering.
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Square files to go public originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
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