Anthony Casalena, CEO at Squarespace.
Square space
Squarespace, which creates software for people to build websites, was released Friday to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SQSP.”
The company avoids a traditional initial public offering, in which it would issue new shares to institutional investors to raise new capital, and instead uses direct listing, 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 choosing direct listings in recent years. Last month, Squarespace raised $ 300 million in funding.
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 services, including online product sales tools.
Squarespace had over 3.6 million subscriptions at the end of the year, up about 23%.
Instead of targeting large businesses, Squarespace focuses on the self-employed and small businesses. DigitalOcean, New York’s cloud infrastructure provider, is also focusing on smaller growth entities.
The 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 at the end of 2020.
Anthony Casalena, the founder and CEO of Squarespace, will control most of Squarespace’s voting power. Squarespace sells Class A shares of its shares, each with one vote, and Casalena holds the vast majority of the company’s Class B shares, which get 10 votes each.
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