Pinterest has been picking up great momentum recently and is using this to their advantage as the company looks to IPO in 2019. They recently hired Francoise Brougher, formerly of Google (GOOGL  ) and Square (SQ  ), as their first COO. Hiring such a well-pedigreed executive is often a sign that a company is preparing an executive team that will help it go public.

Pinterest hit $500 million in sales in 2017 and is on track to almost double that number this year. According to Pinterest's Crunchbase profile, the company has almost three dozen investors from over a dozen rounds, which brought in more than $1.5 billion in capital. This capital is used to grow the number of active users to its current 200 million a month through mobile ads and also push the company's valuation. In the first calendar year after debuting its Promoted Pins in 2013, the company brought in around $25 million. This has made them one of the largest venture capital recipients and one of the highest-valued venture-backed Bay Area companies, according to data from PitchBook. Investors are currently getting more and more bullish on Pinterest. Trades on the secondary market have valued the company at between $13 billion and $15 billion, up from the $12.3 billion valuation it received in June 2017, when it had its last financing round.

Pinterest is an online photo sharing service that allows users "pin" items that they like and are able to follow their friends and other users. They can view a list of subjects such as clothes, household goods, recipes, beauty products, etc.This provides extremely valuable and targeted data about a consumer's interests and intent to buy because they literally pin what they like. Billy Boulia, an executive at Digitas, said that, "No platform capitalizes on the social-search marriage like Pinterest does." Pinterest also introduced buyable pins, which allow customers to create a shopping experience by looking at prices and buying items by linking them to the site where they can make the final purchase. While this can be an odd experience on other platforms, it is directly integrated into Pinterest's model and the fundamentals of the site.

Various fashion and beauty brands have used the site as as a marketing tool and have allocated more dollars towards capitalizing on the data that Pinterest can provide them with. Travel and financial companies are also starting to experiment on Pinterest. Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report showed that 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find and shop for products, whereas only 12% of Facebook (FB  ) and Instagram users do the same on those platforms.

Still, an IPO will be no easy task for Pinterest. Social media rival Snap Inc. (SNAP  ) experienced difficulty after their IPO and Pinterest can definitely use their mistakes to learn from. Currently Google and Facebook control a combined 57% of US digital ad spending, though advertisers are always looking to diversify their budget and improve their competitive edge. Pinterest has been able to avoid the various safety and privacy issues that have plagued Facebook and Instagram among others.

Although Pinterest reached $1 billion in revenue it is still way below estimates of projected sales of $2.8 by 2018. Pinterest is currently used primarily by women even though it has categories that are popular with men as well. It's unclear if Pinterest will be able to widen its audience and continue to grow.