Investors make Snap debut a success

The shares opened at $24 apiece, at the top of expectations.

Timothy Sehn may not be as well known as some of the others on the list, but Snap’s engineering chief is one of the biggest winners from the IPO. After a day of trading, Snap stock was up by over 40 percent and by the time the market closed, it had a price of nearly $25 apiece.

The $3.4 billion sale is the biggest USA tech IPO since Alibaba raised $25 billion in 2014, according to Dealogic. At that price, it had a market value of about $20 billion, based on 1.16 billion shares outstanding after the IPO.

Snap Inc. shares are reportedly expected to start trading around 11am EST on Thursday morning. Meanwhile, Snap’s chairman Michael Lynton planned to sell nearly 55,000 shares in the offering, bringing in more than $930,000.

“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. For the 2016 financial year, SnapChat Inc. recorded revenues of US$404.5 million, with a loss of US$514.6 million.

“We may also use a portion of the net proceeds to acquire complementary businesses, products, services, or technologies”, Snap said in its filing. “It is unclear when or if Snap’s drone would become available to consumers”, the report says. While the company has more daily active users than Twitter, that growth is now slowing.

The drone prospect offers a glimpse into what Snap might be considering next, and could have a huge impact on its future value and growth.

Whenever a company prepares for its IPO, its executives head off on a roadshow – a tour of potential investors. It’s the largest deal by a US -based company since Facebook’s 2012 public debut.

Investors kept a close eye on Snap’s IPO, as public offerings have been slowing down these years.

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, co-founders of Snap, both planned to sell 16 million shares in the offering, bringing in about $272 million each.