Snapchat’s $24 Billion IPO Arrives, The Biggest Tech Debut Since Alibaba

The company will reap about $2.3 billion in net proceeds from the sale of 200 million shares of Class A common stock.

The exact timing of Snap shares trading will be up to the lead underwriters and their specialists will be taking the steps to meticulously match buyers and sellers, wrote IPOboutique.com in an email to clients. New shareholders have chosen to take the glass-half-full approach to its average revenue per user, which is not only lower than Facebook at its 2012 IPO but also lower than Twitter’s in 2013.

Evan Spiegel is already a very rich man.

Reflecting strong investor demand for the vanishing-message app maker, Snap on Wednesday priced shares for the IPO at $17 per share.

Snap Inc., the parent of sexting app-turned-media giant Snapchat, minted plenty of new millionaires – and billionaires – as the company’s stock soared 44 percent on Thursday in its first day as a public company.

In early February, Snap released its financial statement for 2016, reporting $404.5 million in revenue – nearly seven times the $58 million reported in 2015.

Snap marks Lightspeed’s third exit in less than six months – it made early bets on Nutanix, which went public in September and is now worth about $4.5 billion, and AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion in January.

Bernadette Tansey is Xconomy’s San Francisco Editor.

Snap is the year’s most highly anticipated IPO, and a poor first-day showing could have kept the gate closed to more offerings.

“While the valuation of $25bn does seem fully loaded, the user growth Snapchat has seen in such a short space of time makes this an exciting prospect”. Snap’s pricing valued the company at $24 billion.

Snap Inc. shares are reportedly expected to start trading around 11am EST on Thursday morning. It’s not uncommon for the price of shares in an IPO to rise slightly from the company’s initial estimate. Which is Snap? It is impossible to say at this stage. “They need to get to 300 million by 2018 and I don’t think it will happen-their user growth is slowing”.