Soul has filed a prospectus with the SECURITIES and Exchange Commission to list on nasdaq under the symbol SSR. The amount of money Soul raised in its IPO was not disclosed.
Soul App’s revenue was 70.7 million yuan in 2019 and 498 million yuan in 2020, respectively, and 238 million yuan in the first quarter of 2021, up 260 percent year-on-year, according to the prospectus.
As of the first quarter of 2021, the Soul App had 33.2 million mobile monthly active users and 9.1 million daily active users, up 109% and 94.4 percent, respectively.
According to the prospectus, 73.9% of Soul’s DAUs are Gen Z, and as of March 2021, 56.4 percent of Soul’s monthly active days were more than 15 days.
Soul recorded 268,900 monthly paying users in 2019, 929,300 in 2020, and 1.54 million in the first quarter of 2021.
For now, though, Soul remains in the red. Soul posted a net loss of 300 million yuan and 488 million yuan from 2019 to 2020, respectively, and a net loss of 383 million yuan in the first quarter of 2021, up 624.7 percent year-on-year, according to the prospectus.
Marketing is Soul’s biggest expense, reaching 620 million yuan in 2020, more than its total revenue, according to the prospectus.
Soul was founded in 2015 and has since raised four rounds of funding, the most recent in June 2019, meaning it hasn’t raised outside funding in nearly two years, compared to almost every year before that.
On the shareholder side, Soul founder Lu Zhang had a 32 per cent stake and 65 per cent voting rights before the IPO, according to the prospectus. Its institutional shareholders include Tencent and Yuansheng, among which Tencent holds 49.9% of the shares and 25.7% of the voting rights of the company, making it the largest institutional shareholder.