Tomorrow’s $9B unicorn 🦄

Video conferencing service Zoom is set to go public tomorrow, and will list its shares under the ticker “ZM” on the Nasdaq. Yesterday, Zoom raised the top end of its IPO range, pricing shares at $33 - $35 a piece.

Why it matters: Zoom is now positioned to see an initial market cap of $9B, which is 9X the $1B valuation its received after its last funding round in 2017. And another thing — Zoom is profitable, which is rare among tech unicorns hankering to IPO. 👀

A brief history: Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, who previously worked for Cisco and built WebEx. Zoom initially gained traction among startups, especially as small, distributed teams started to become more ubiquitous (we use Zoom!). 🤗

We took a trip down memory lane to find out what folks thought when Zoom first launched on Product Hunt five years ago:

“We have a distributed team, and we use Zoom all day every day to stay connected and quickly jump into conversations when needed.” - Thomas

“I don't know how they do it, but the quality and reliability are ridiculously amazing. We use it several times a day for our distributed team. Skype and Hangouts simply don't cut it for team calls” - Eric

“Tried them all. Cursed at the all. This is the best. Hands down.” - Jason

With the rise of distributed teams, demand for video communications is booming.

In addition to Zoom, big players include Google Hangouts, Skype and calls on Slack. There's also BlueJeans for video meetings and Livestorm for webinars.

P.S. In other IPO news: Pinterest is also planning to go public on Thursday.