Snapchat shares will likely cost $17 each on their debut

The shares were set to begin trading Thursday under the symbol SNAP on the New York Stock Exchange. That was well above the $14-$16 range initially expected, a sign of strong investor demand for the five-year-old firm.

Nonvoting shares means that investors who buy Snap stock, which will trade under the ticker SNAP on the New York Stock Exchange, won’t be very attractive to activist investors. Twitter (TWTR), with its November 2013 IPO, raised $1.8 billion – though all three IPOs pale in comparison to the $25 billion raised by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA) with its September 2014 IPO, the biggest ever.

“It’s also the first to go public among a class of companies, including Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest, that have been valued at more than $10 billion while still privately held”, it added.

A Bay Area high school that counts itself among Snap Inc.’s first investors stands to win big after a booming initial public offering and first-day trading.

“In a regulatory filing ahead of the IPO, the company said roughly one-quarter of its planned float of 200 million shares would be subject to a lockup of one year before that chunk could be sold”. In particular, Facebook’s Instagram may emerge as a substitute for Snapchat. Snap stock rose another 3% throughout the day on Thursday, closing at $24.48 per share and valuing Snap at $28.3 billion. The company has been in dire need of cash after posting a net loss of $372.9 million in 2015 and $514.6 million the following year.

“This is setting a new precedent”, says Lise Buyer, an IPO expert with Class V Group, who helped take Google public.

Despite a almost seven-fold increase in revenue, Snap’s net loss widened 38 per cent previous year. Snap only has one hardware product on the market-Spectacles, a $130 pair of Bluetooth-connected sunglasses that capture short videos that can be uploaded to Snapchat.

Saint Francis has not disclosed the value of its Snapchat holdings, but Makley said it is far and away the school’s most successful investment – beating out a $2.1 million return on an earlier bet in a company called Advanced Fiber.

Protesters demonstrated outside Snap Inc.’s Venice headquarters on Thursday, claiming that the company is turning colorful local retail space into tiresome offices.

But Snap’s core business is still its messaging app, which has a much smaller audience than rival Facebook.