Roku has filed for an initial public offering and is looking to raise up to $100M. The company will be listed on the NASDAQ appropriately under the ticker of ROKU.
We reported in July that Roku was planning an IPO[1] in 2017. Roku has been able to capitalize on the cord-cutting trend[2], where many people, especially millennials, have opted not to pay for cable television. Instead, they are accessing content on digital platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire TV and others. Roku is the number one streaming device[3] when measured by total hours streamed.
This has been a long time coming. Roku was founded in 2002 and raised over $200M from various VCs and investment firms. The company was key in helping create the home streaming device market. It was one of the first devices to target general users rather than the technically savy. Roku never left that demographic.
The today company claims to have 15.1M accounts and stream quarterly 3.5 billion hours of content, which is up 60% year-over-year.
Menlo Ventures looks to be the largest shareholder with a 35.3% stake followed by Fidelity with 12.9%, Twenty-First Century Fox at 7% and Globespan Capital Partners at 6.1%.
Roku is states its average revenue per unit is $11.22, up 35%. It reported $199m in revenue in the six month period ending in June 30, 2017, up from the year prior of $162M. Its annual revenue numbers also increased year-over-year up from $319M to $398M.
The company’s primary gross profit source is switching from hardware sales to its platform, mainly around advertising and subscription revenue. In January ’17 hardware sales represented 19% of total gross profit while down 28%. Meanwhile, the platform...