LinkedIn Said Likely to File for Initial Public Offering Today

(Bloomberg) -- LinkedIn Corp., the largest networking website for professionals, is likely to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering as early as today, a person familiar with the situation said.

LinkedIn, of Mountain View, California, hired Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to lead the offering, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. LinkedIn spokesman Hani Durzy declined to comment.

The company is valued at $2.5 billion on SharesPost Inc., an exchange for shares of private companies. The filing would come after Demand Media Inc., a provider of content for social- media websites, expanded its IPO earlier this week by 26 percent, raising $151 million. A $500 million investment in Facebook Inc. by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies valued Facebook at $50 billion, Facebook said last week.

LinkedIn, which has more than 1,000 employees, has grown to 90 million users in more than 200 countries, according to the company. Members use the site to search for jobs, recruit employees and find industry experts. The site is dwarfed by Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, the most popular social network, which has more than 500 million users.

The plans for an IPO filing were reported earlier by the AllThingsDigital blog.