- Roblox raised $520 million in Series H funding.
- It sold its shares at $45 per unit.
- The company will go public through Direct Listing Offering.
Roblox is a user-generated game platform. Recently, it raised $520 million in a seed funding round. The company plans to go public through a direct listing. Roblox’s existing shareholders will directly sell shares to other investors. The company reached a valuation of $29.5 billion after the private funding deal.
Why is Roblox using the DPO method?
The direct listing offering (DPO) aids in avoiding the usual initial public offering (IPO) process. The company decided to move forward with DPO as the IPO method is more costly. Also, the US Securities and Exchange Commission gave permissions to raise capital through a direct listing on December 22.
Roblox is planning to go public after the completion of its Series H funding round. This round was led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group. The company had previously raised over $335 million from its investors. Other participants in this round were Santa Barbara, Warner Music Group, among others. Roblox priced its share at $45 per unit in the Series H funding round. With the capital influx, the company will proceed to grow its platform. It is aiming to build a human co-experience platform enabling its users to share experiences among themselves.
Roblox’s CEO, David Baszucki says that they are working towards its aim of enabling a shared experience on its platform. Earlier, they filed a confidential draft registration statement with the USSEC for its IPO.
Roblox’s valuation in public and private markets are indicating the demand for tech stocks. Also, the valuation highlights how the market expects the company to benefit from pandemic trends. All this can be attributed to the online push users made on the social gaming platforms. The platform had 17.6 million users back in 2019. During the pandemic, this number grew to over 30 million daily active users on the platform. The app was downloaded around 160 million times from the App Store and Play Store, in 2020. It is a 43% jump as compared to last year, up from 111.4 million installs.
