Website-hosting company Squarespace has boosted its valuation to $10 billion with a new funding round ahead of a planned public offering.
The Hudson Square-based company announced a $300 million funding round with backing from the investment firms Tiger Global and Fidelity, among others. Squarespace in January said it had filed confidentially to sell shares to the public, either through an initial public offering or direct listing.
The $10 billion valuation places Squarespace as the second highest-valued private startup in the city, behind automation software company UIPath's $35 billion private value, according to a list kept by research firm CBInsights.
CEO Anthony Casalena said the funding would help scale up Squarespace's products globally. The company has 1,200 employees across offices in Lower Manhattan, Dublin, Ireland, Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles.
Squarespace expanded its headquarters at 225 Varick St. to 150,000 square feet in 2019, utilizing a $2.2 million tax credit tied to its pledge to hire 156 employees by 2022, adding to its local headcount of about 750. Casalena told Crain's at the time that the company was profitable.
The company's main business is hosting websites, with tools to make them easy to design and edit. The software also offers e-commerce tools so small businesses can sell online. Shopify, a publicly-traded Canadian company with similar offerings, has seen its stock more than triple in value since the start of the pandemic.
Founded in 2003, Squarespace is among the city's best-known homegrown technology companies, in part for its heavy advertising. The Squarespace logo has been prominently placed on the front New York Knicks' jerseys since 2017. For last month's Super Bowl, Squarespace hired Dolly Parton for an ad campaign where she sang a reimagined version of her hit "9 to 5" as "5 to 9," a nod to the side hustle businesses Squarespace helps enable. That may have been a misstep, however, as the promotion made several "worst ads" rankings following the game for, as The Washington Post put it, "encouraging people to work harder and longer hours during a freakin’ pandemic."
This is the first new investment for Squarespace since 2017, when the company raised $200 million. The firm has raised $579 million total, according to Crunchbase.
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March 17, 2021 at 10:31PM
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Squarespace second highest valued startup in New York City following $300M investment - Crain's New York Business
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