Triller is finally heading to the public markets after trimming losses and tweaking its investor pitch. Here are 3 main takeaways from the hundreds of pages it filed.

• Triller’s preliminary S-1 filing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange has been released.
• The company reported a smaller net loss in 2022 than in 2021 and around $48 million in 2022 revenue.
• It highlighted an atypical set of key operating metrics, citing user engagement on competitor apps.

More than a year after first announcing plans to go public, Triller is aiming for a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.****Among other things, the tech firm operates a TikTok-like video app, streams combat sports, and sells digital-marketing services.

It released its preliminary prospectus, or S-1, last week. It depicts a company that has significantly reduced its spending after going on a buying spree in 2021.

Triller spent that year acquiring a number of media and entertainment companies, including rap-battle platform Verzuz and combat-sports streamer FITE, racking up over $700 million in net losses. In 2022, the company reported a loss of around $196 million while increasing revenue by roughly 80% year on year to ****$47.7 million.

While Triller has significantly reduced costs, the company also stated that it owes money to various vendors for expenses such as music licensing, real-estate rentals, engineering, marketing, and legal work. Several of its partners, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and the analytics firm Sensor Tower, have sued it for alleged bill nonpayment. Late last year, Triller removed music from major rights holders from its app. The company said it saved $7.7 million in the first quarter of 2023 by lowering its music licensing costs. In July, it reached an agreement with Sony Music.

Triller claims to have raised over $380 million in capital since its inception. As of March, ****it had a $1.29 billion accumulated deficit and $2.16 million in cash on hand.

Triller’s long road to a public offering began in December 2021, when it announced a reverse merger with a company called Seachange International. It scrapped that plan in June 2022 in favor of a direct listing. After confidentially submitting its registration paperwork, it was still facing SEC delays in January, according to a spokesperson.

Triller’s pitch to retail investors has evolved as it has shifted between go-public strategies. Over the years, the company has leaned into several hot tech categories, including NFTs, creators, metaverse technology, and artificial intelligence.

Here are three key takeaways from Triller’s filing, which examines the company’s current state of affairs and its pitch to investors as it prepares to go public:

1. Triller is still leaning into celebrities and influencers to pitch its business

Triller has long sought the services of influencers, musicians, and other celebrities as investors and promoters.

Snoop Dogg, The Weeknd, and Marshmello were among the musicians who joined the company as investors and strategic advisors in 2019. It appointed TikToker Josh Richards as its chief strategy officer and investor in July 2020. (The S-1 filing makes no mention of Richards.)

Celebrities and creators continue to be an important part of the company’s pitch to investors in its most recent filing.

The company used images of celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and DJ Khaled inside Triller products in its S-1. It also included a brief section on how TikTok’s Charli D’Amelio used Triller’s text-marketing tool, Cliqz, to engage with fans. D’Amelio and her family joined Triller in 2020 and took part in the company’s “Friday Flip Day” campaign, a creator-marketing push aimed at converting TikTok fans to Triller.

Triller’s preliminary prospectus mentioned TikTok 23 times. It was identified as a competitor as well as a platform where the company measures user interactions for its own business.

2. Triller’s key operating metrics include engagement on competitor apps like TikTok and Instagram

Triller includes a unique set of engagement metrics in its S-1 to help investors understand its business, including a measure of how people interact with Triller content on competitor apps such as TikTok and Snapchat.

Triller wrote that the company reports a statistic called “user interactions,” which it defines as the “number of posts, messages, automated communications, and e-commerce transactions” it believes it enabled, even if they occurred outside of Triller’s ecosystem on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, websites, or SMS messaging.

According to the company’s S-1, it enabled 513 million interactions in Q1 2023, up from 400 million in Q1 2022 and 1.7 billion in Q1 2021.

Triller also ****divided ****a number of other key metrics by quarter. In the first quarter of 2023, it reported:

• Approximately 1 billion social-media posts on and off its own apps, including “text comments, images, videos, and other short-form content”
• Approximately 181 billion social reactions to those posts, which include “any reaction, comment, or share of an original social media post” on and off its owned apps.
• It tracks approximately 2.4 million creators and 26,000 brands across its databases ****or various platforms.

According to a Triller “investor deck” dated September 2022 and viewed by Insider, the company’s recently acquired influencer-marketing product Julius has over 2 million creators and around 25,000 brands on its own.

Triller’s S-1 is notable for the absence of active user counts across its platforms.

Triller does not use metrics like monthly or daily active users to show the scale of its owned-and-operated apps like Instagram owner Meta Platforms and Snapchat maker Snap Inc.

Third-party analytics firms, former employees, and a source with knowledge of Triller’s rights-holder relationships disputed its publicly reported numbers to TechCrunch, Insider, and Billboard in 2020.

Triller’s then-CEO Mike Lu, now a director, told Billboard in early 2021 that the company had “never inflated any user numbers,” that there was no legal definition of monthly active users, and that the company would no longer share the data point.

The company stated in its S-1 that it had “established more than 550 million user accounts” across its offerings, which it defined as anyone who created an account.

3. Once public, voting power at Triller will be controlled by a few individuals and entities

Triller’s cofounders are reorganizing the company’s operations in order to maintain control of decision-making even after the company goes public.

Triller’s voting power will be controlled by three entities: cofounder Ryan Kavanaugh’s Proxima Media, cofounder Bobby Sarnevesht, and other “entities and trusts they or their immediate family members or affiliates control.” These executives will own approximately 15.4% of the company’s outstanding capital stock but will have more voting power depending on the class of stock they hold.

“These parties will be able to exercise considerable influence and control over matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and the approval of significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or our assets,” the company wrote in its S-1.