Pinterest on its way to $578 million funding round
Pinterest is well over halfway to a $577.9 million capital-raising round, with the company having already secured $367 million of what is set to become its Series G round.
The online scrapbooking social network only has $210.8 million to go before completing its latest fundraising target, according to a document filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, published on March 16.
Reports were flying as early as last month that the San Francisco-based company was in the midst of a fundraising effort that would value the company at $11 billion. However, the fundraising target at the time had been thought to be around $500 million, according to Bloomberg.
If the latest funding round is successfully completed, it will more than double the $5 billion valuation that the company attained after it completed its $200 million Series F funding round last year.
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Since its launch in 2009, Pinterest has raised $764 million, not including the amount it has already secured in its current funding round, which would bring the company's total fundraising efforts to well over $1 billion, whether or not it raises the outstanding amount in the new round.
The latest funding effort will see the company close in on some of the planet's most highly valued venture capital-backed startups, including Uber, which is valued at $41.2 billion, and Snapchat, valued at around $15 billion following reports that Alibaba Group would pump $200 million into the messaging platform.
Pinterest's forecast $11 billion valuation is also set to see the company surpass the likes of Airbnb and Dropbox, both of which are valued at $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In a statement on Monday, Pinterest said that the latest round included participation from new and previous investors, and said that it plans to use the additional capital for corporate purposes, including to fuel international expansion.
The platform already caters for more than 70 million monthly visitors, with more than 30 billion "pins" uploaded by users onto the bulletin board-style platform.
The capital-raising document filing follows the release of Pinterest's 2014 full-year transparency report summary, which was published on March 6.
The report revealed that the company had received 39 requests for users' data from 54 accounts from US law-enforcement agencies, one request for three accounts from Canadian agencies, and one request for one account from Australian law-enforcement agencies.
By contrast, Australian law-enforcement agencies made 829 requests for data from 933 Facebook users' accounts during the second half of 2014, while US authorities submitted 14,274 requests for data from the social media giant, according to its latest transparency report.