Reddit: What It Does, Who Runs It, Funding and News

Reddit, Inc. is a publicly traded company that runs Reddit, a site and app made up of user-run communities, known as subreddits. Its annual report for 2025 (the Form 10-K it files with the SEC) counts over 100,000 active communities, an average of 121.4 million daily active uniques (Reddit's term for distinct daily users) and 471.6 million weekly active uniques in the last three months of 2025.

Y Combinator's (YC) company page sums Reddit up as "The frontpage of the internet" and still labels it acquired, which refers to Condé Nast buying it in 2006. That label is out of date: Reddit was later spun out, raised venture money and has been a public company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, since March 2024. This page sets out Reddit's key facts, how it earns money, who runs and controls it, how it was funded, and what has happened between mid-2025 and October 2026.

Reddit key facts

YC's page gives a team size of 2,000, while the 10-K reports 2,555 employees on December 31, 2025. The 10-K is a formal filing with regulators and is the more recent figure.

What Reddit does

Reddit hosts communities organized around a topic, each with its own moderators, where users post links, text and media, vote on them and comment. The company makes money mainly from advertising: third-party ads were about 94% of revenue in 2025, according to the 10-K. The rest is other revenue, chiefly content licensing, which the filing says Reddit has only recently started earning, with substantially all of the contract value coming from two partners it does not name. The Associated Press has reported that Reddit has licensed its content to companies that pay to train AI systems on public Reddit comments.

Products and features named in the 10-K include:

• Reddit Answers. AI-powered conversational search over Reddit posts, which the filing says Reddit began integrating into its core search in 2025.
• Ad products. Contextual and interest-based ads, Dynamic Product Ads, conversation summary add-ons, and Max campaigns, announced in beta in January 2026.
• Reddit Pro. Tools for businesses and publishers on Reddit.
• Reddit Community Intelligence and Reddit Insights. AI-driven tools that help brands follow what people say on Reddit.

Who runs Reddit

Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit and has been its CEO and President since July 2015, according to Reddit's proxy statement filed April 23, 2026. The same filing lists these executive officers as of March 31, 2026:

Christopher Slowe, Chief Technology Officer from May 2017, became Senior Technical Fellow in April 2026 and is no longer an executive officer, the proxy says. On August 12, 2026, Reddit disclosed in a Form 8-K that Benjamin Lee would step down as Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary effective September 14, 2026, staying on as an employee through September 25 to hand over his work. The same filing says Reddit expects to appoint Paul Cappuccio to both roles, without giving a start date.

The board nominated for the June 2026 annual meeting had eight members: Huffman, Sarah Farrell, Patricia Fili-Krushel, Porter Gale, David Habiger (independent Chair since November 2023), Steven O. Newhouse, Robert A. Sauerberg Jr. (independent Vice Chair) and Michael Seibel. Newhouse and Sauerberg are Advance designees, per the proxy.

Who owns Reddit

Reddit is public, but most of its high-vote stock belongs to Advance Magazine Publishers, and Steve Huffman controls most of the votes. Class A shares carry one vote each, Class B ten and Class C none, according to the 10-K. As of March 31, 2026, the proxy shows Advance Magazine Publishers holding 42,191,092 Class B shares, 83.5% of that class and 65.2% of total voting power, and Tencent-affiliated entities holding 6.1% of the votes. Both figures rest on the holders' own Schedule 13G reports, as of September 30, 2024 for Advance and September 30, 2025 for Tencent. Through irrevocable proxies over Advance's and Tencent's shares, Huffman controlled 76.1% of the total voting power, a figure that includes the votes on those shares. Advance can also designate two directors and a nonvoting board observer, the 10-K says.

Reddit funding and IPO

Condé Nast bought Reddit in fall 2006, about a year after it was founded, and its parent, Advance Publications, later spun Reddit off as an independent company while keeping a large stake, as TechCrunch reported in 2017. The 10-K dates Reddit's incorporation to May 2011. Rounds with published figures:

The valuations in the table come from press coverage of each round, not from Reddit's filings. In February 2026 Reddit's board authorized buying back up to $1 billion of Class A stock, with no expiration date, according to the 10-K.

Recent Reddit news: lawsuits, results and leadership

• October 22, 2025: Reddit sued an AI search company and three data-scraping firms in federal court in New York, alleging large-scale scraping of Reddit comments, including through Google Search results (AP).
• December 2025: Reddit filed a High Court of Australia challenge to the country's under-16 social media restrictions, arguing they are wrongly applied to a mostly adult forum and force intrusive age checks, while saying it would comply during the review (The News Minute, December 12, 2025).
• February 2026: Full-year 2025 revenue reached $2.2 billion, up 69%, with net income of $529.7 million after a 2024 net loss of $484.3 million; the board authorized a $1 billion buyback (Form 10-K).
• April 30, 2026: First-quarter revenue grew 69% year over year to $663 million and net income was $204 million, with 126.8 million daily active uniques (Q1 release).
• July 30, 2026: Revenue for April to June grew 61% year over year to $805 million and net income was $253 million. Reddit bought back 1.5 million shares for $235 million and guided to third-quarter revenue of $860 million to $870 million (Q2 release).
• August 12, 2026: Chief Legal Officer Benjamin Lee announced he would step down effective September 14 (Form 8-K).