Squarespace raises $300M in a round valuing it at $10B, two months after it filed confidentially to go public via a direct listing or an IPO
Squarespace has raised $300 million in a round of funding that values the company at a staggering $10 billion valuation.
Context & Ripple Effects
Squarespace entered 2021 moving fast toward the public markets: it had confidentially filed for an IPO in January, seven years after its last disclosed institutional round — General Atlantic's $200M investment at a $1.7B valuation in December 2017, which funded buybacks rather than growth.
The March raise resets that mark to $10B — roughly a sixfold jump in barely three years — arriving just weeks before the company would file its NYSE direct-listing paperwork disclosing $621.1M of 2020 revenue. It is a classic pre-exit liquidity event: fresh cash for insiders and early holders at a price set privately, with no market check yet applied.
First-order effects
- Squarespace banks $300M of primary capital weeks before going public, giving it balance-sheet room through the listing process without depending on IPO proceeds.
- Late-stage investors enter at $10B, effectively underwriting their own exit price months before any public buyer gets a vote on what the shares are worth.
Second-order effects
- The public market immediately repriced that private mark: NYSE set the reference price implying about $6.8B, and the stock closed its first day around $5.9B — meaning the March round was underwater within two months of closing.
- That gap between the $10B round and the ~$5.9B debut becomes the reference point for how later buyers value the company — the 2024 take-private by Permira at ~$6.9B lands almost exactly where the direct listing did, not where the final private round priced.
Third-order effects
- The arc from a $1.7B round in 2017, to a $10B mark in March 2021, to a public debut below both illustrates the private valuation–liquidity gap: late private rounds can price companies above what liquid markets will sustain once trading begins.
- If the pattern holds, pre-IPO mega-rounds function less as financing than as exit windows for insiders, and the durable anchor for a company's real value ends up being whatever a strategic or PE acquirer will pay — here roughly $6.9B, not $10B.
The trend: Pre-IPO funding rounds are increasingly setting paper valuations that public markets and eventual acquirers decline to honor, making the last private mark a ceiling rather than a floor.