LinkedIn Looking for $1 Billion Valuation

Yesterday I “revealed” LinkedIn’s plan for global domination. While it wasn’t much of a plan and instead a confession of my belief that LinkedIn will be extremely successful with their platform, there was a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn yesterday. Venturebeat began a rumor that LinkedIn might get acquired due to a board meeting going over.

Later in the day Techcrunch reported that there was some legitimacy to the rumors saying that their sources informed them that LinkedIn was being pitched by Allen & Co. at $1 billion for a new round of venture financing. The round was being led by Dave Wehner who led the sale of Bebo for $850 million to AOL.

This is pretty big news as the valuation of top social networking sites continues to skyrocket. As I mentioned yesterday, LinkedIn has been receiving CPM (cost per thousand views) ad rates as high as $75. As of yet, this is probably the highest rate in the industry and much of it is due to the premium demographic that they are targeting. While I’m not quite sure why the company needs to raise more money, a $1 billion valuation is completely reasonable given Facebook’s recent $15 billion valuation.

There’s no word on when a possible round would be closing but it will be interesting to see if this speculation turns out to be true.