If successful, LinkedIn’s offering will be a boon for Boston-based Bain Capital. Bain’s venture arm led a $53 million round of funding for the company in 2008, along with earlier investors Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Greylock Partners. The earlier investments were made from those firms’ West Coast offices; Greylock, an old name in Boston venture capital, moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2009.
When Bain Capital made its investment, LinkedIn was valued at $1 billion. Wall Street estimates of its current value are as high as $2.5 billion to $3 billion.
LinkedIn’s filing could encourage other rapidly growing Internet services to finally test the public markets after amassing zealous followings among millions of users. Other likely candidates include coupon service Groupon, which rejected a $6 billion takeover bid from Google Inc. last year; game maker Zynga; messaging service Twitter; and potentially the biggest investment opportunity of all, social networking phenomenon Facebook, which has already indicated it was likely to file its IPO plans by the end of April 2012.
LinkedIn, based down the street from Google’s Mountain View headquarters, is the most mature of the group. It started in 2003, a year before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched his website as a Harvard sophomore.
Since then, Facebook has emerged as a hot spot for having fun and wasting time while LinkedIn has positioned itself as a place for getting down to business.
Kibitzing with friends and family has proven to be vastly more popular than contemplating work. More than 90 million people have set up profiles on LinkedIn, compared with more than 600 million Facebook. But LinkedIn company earned $1.85 million on revenue of $161 million during the first nine months of last year, according to the IPO filing.
Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch are the main investment banks steering LinkedIn’s IPO.
Beth Healy of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
