Reddit is seeking to hire investment bankers and lawyers for an initial public offering in New York, two people familiar with the matter told the Reuters news agency.

Reddit was valued at $10bn in a private fundraising round last month. By the time the IPO would take place early next year, the online message board company is hoping it will be valued at more than $15bn, one of the sources said.

The sources cautioned that the timing and size of the IPO were subject to market conditions and asked not to be identified because the preparations are confidential. A Reddit spokesperson declined to comment.

Reddit’s move to hire advisers for its IPO has not been reported before, but there has been significant speculation in recent months on the company’s go-public plans, after years of staying private.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Steve Huffman, the CEO, said that the company was planning to go public but had not decided on the timing.

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman, the entrepreneur and investor Alexis Ohanian and the late internet activist Aaron Swartz. It became known for its niche discussion groups, lagging the popularity of other major social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

But the San Francisco-based company saw explosive growth as a result of retail investors flocking to its message boards at the start of the year for tips on trading GameStop and other meme stocks. Most Wall Street analysts deemed the meme stocks as hugely overvalued.

Reddit had roughly 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities, or “subreddits”, as of October last year. Huffman has said it gained millions of new users earlier this year during the height of the trading frenzy, but more recent user figures have not yet been released.

The company makes most of its money through advertising. It reported $100m in advertising revenue in the second quarter, an almost threefold jump from the same period last year.

Reddit’s biggest investors include Fidelity Investments, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings.