LinkedIn announces IPO

Career-oriented social network LinkedIn on Thursday registered with US regulators to have an initial public offering of stock.

The Mountain View, California-based startup filed paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) saying that it planned to raise money expand its operations.

“We believe we are transforming the way people work by connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale,” LinkedIn said in the SEC filing.

“Our goal is to provide a global platform capable of mapping every professional’s experience, skills and other relevant professional data to his or her professional graph, including connections with colleagues and business contacts.”

The number of shares to be offered and the price range had not been determined, LinkedIn said in a press release posted at its website.

LinkedIn described itself in the filing as the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 90 million members in more than 200 countries.

LinkedIn members cultivate and manage career or business networks in the online community.

The startup made a net profit of $10 million on net revenue of $161 million in the first nine months of 2010, according to the LinkedIn filing with the SEC.

US tech blog Techcrunch writes that out of the five percent stockholders, the company’s largest shareholder is LinkedIn’s founder and chairman Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee, owning 19 million shares or 21.4 percent of the company. The blog says he’s followed by Sequoia Capital (16.8 million shares or 18.9 percent), Greylock Partners (14 million shares or 15.8 percent) and Bessemer Venture Partners (4.6 million shares or 5.1 percent).

Seqouia was LinkedIn’s earliest investor in 2003, followed by Greylock in 2004. Bessemer participated in LinkedIn’s three later rounds in 2007 and 2008. – AFP