Job Portal ZipRecruiter Files S-1 To Go Public

The latest hot technology startup to initiate moves for a public listing is ZipRecruiter, a popular online jobs portal. The…

ZipRecruiter logo


The latest hot technology startup to initiate moves for a public listing is ZipRecruiter, a popular online jobs portal. The company has filed plans for a direct listing, taking the path that several hot technology companies have sought to go public as of late (most recently Coinbase and Squarespace).

ZipRecruiter has unveiled an S-1 filing to the US SEC as is usual for companies planning public listings. Also, as expected, the S-1 filing provides better insight into ZipRecruiter’s business with information not publicly known before.

  • To start, ZipRecruiter is very profitable unlike many technology startups of its kind. It reported a net income of $86 million on $418 million in revenue in 2020. In the year before that, it had a small net loss of $6 million on $430 million in revenue.
  • ZipRecruiter has very good gross profit margins, producing over $400 million in sales with about $54 million in “Cost of revenue” both in 2020 and 2019. What majorly eats into the company’s gross profits is very high marketing spend, coming at $191 million and $276 million in 2020 and 2019 respectively.
  • ZipRecruiter is an online job portal whose business model is charging businesses a subscription fee for the usage of its platform to seek workers. It’s such that when a business posts a new job opening on ZipRecruiter, that posting is shared to over 1,000 other partner job boards across the web and this makes ZipRecruiter attractive to employers.
  • In its S-1 filing, ZipRecruiter says it serves 14 million monthly active job seekers. The company says more than 2.8 million businesses and 110 million job seekers have used its platform since its founding in 2010.
  • With a direct listing, it’s apparent that ZipRecruiter doesn’t want to raise fresh capital on the public markets, unsurprising given its high profitability. It’ll list its shares directly on the public markets without the use of intermediary banks in a way that shareholders can begin selling on the first day of trading as opposed to the usual lockup period restrictions that come with a traditional IPO process.
  • ZipRecruiter is backed by over $200 million in venture funding and was valued at $1.5 billion from its last funding round in 2018. The company has just three main VC investors being IVP, Industry Ventures, and Basepoint Ventures.
  • ZipRecruiter has filed to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol “ZIP”.

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