Sonos files for an IPO that may value the company at $3 billion

Smart speaker and audio company Sonos has confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating it plans to hold an initial public offering as soon as this summer, according to a report today from The Wall Street Journal. The report says it’s likely Sonos would raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital with an IPO, and that it’s market valuation may be around $2.5 to $3 billion as a result. The IPO could happen as soon as June.

Sonos has been around since 2002, when it became one of the first audio hardware companies to invest heavily in wireless speakers. Since then, Sonos has grown to be a massive player in the home audio space, earning more than $1 billion in annual revenue thanks to its platform agnostic approach to music streaming services and its integrations with Amazon’s Alexa assistant. Now, Sonos primarily competes with high-end home audio brands one on end and with tech companies like Apple, which released the HomePod to take on Sonos and other smart speakers, on the cheaper end.

Sonos’ strengths lie in the design and overall aesthetic quality of its products and in the fact that they work with almost every combination of smartphone operating system and streaming service. The company has also benefitted substantially from linking its speakers together — Sonos was one of the first consumer product companies to do multi-room wireless audio — and creating a hardware ecosystem consumers can augment and add to over time. The company’s most recent products include the Sonos One smart speaker with Alexa integration and its pricey $699 Playbase TV speaker that doubles as a centerpiece of a Sonos surround system.