Because these are existing shares being sold by people who already own them, though, Roblox itself 'will not receive any proceeds from the sale.' In total, 196.7 million 'Class A' shares of Roblox may be up for grabs. So instead of using its IPO to raise cash, sometime in 'early February' Roblox will simply allow the people who currently own its shares to begin selling them to the public - at whatever price the market will bear. After collecting the proceeds from its private placement, you can probably up that estimate to $1.3 billion. In fact, in its S-1 prospectus, Roblox advised that, as of the end of September 2020, it already had more than $800 million in cash in the bank. In an ordinary IPO, a company creates shares and sells them to the public to raise cash - and gets an accurate read on the value of its stock as a fringe benefit, 'seeing' for the first time what people are really willing to pay for them on the public market. As the company advised, instead of conducting an ordinary 'underwritten' IPO at a set offer price (the way most companies go public), Roblox will conduct a 'direct listing' of its shares - offering them to the public at whatever price investors are willing to pay.

Then, two days later, Roblox amended its S-1 'going public' filing with the SEC.

6, the company conducted a private placement of stock, raising about $520 million in cash for itself.

Earlier this month, Roblox finally came to a decision about how it would do that.

Roblox valuation ipo