Pinterest Prices IPO At $19 A Share; Raises $1.43B

Pinterest priced its initial public offering at $19 a share late Wednesday (April 17) raising $1.43 billion and giving the company a valuation of $10 billion.

According to a report in CNBC, the image search company has originally priced shares between $15 and $17 a share but raised it after the IPO received more interest than expected.

The higher price per share comes even as Lyft has failed to take off since becoming a publicly traded company.  Since going public at the end of March, Lyft shares are down 19 percent from its IPO price.

Reports had surfaced earlier Wednesday that Pinterest would raise its IPO range ahead of the offering. Pinterest will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange later Thursday (April 18). Investors are paying close attention to how the IPO performs to gauge the appetite for more IPOs by tech companies. Uber, which is expected to have the largest IPO valuation ever, is slated to go public in May.  Zoom, the video conferencing company, is also scheduled to begin trading Thursday and based on how it performs, could end up with a valuation of more than Pinterest.  Even with the increased IPO price, Pinterest is still being valued under the $12 billion valuation it was given in 2017, the last time it engaged in a fundraising round.

Stock performance on IPO day:

LinkedIn: +109%
Microsoft: +49%
Snapchat: +44%
Tesla: +41%
Alibaba: +38%
Apple: +32%
Amazon: +31%
Pinterest: +25%
Google: +18%
Spotify: +13%
Netflix: +12%
Lyft: +9%
Facebook: +1%
Uber: -8%

— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) May 12, 2019

Pinterest is becoming a publicly traded company with 82 million regular users in the U.S. with about 80 percent of American mothers active on the site — a group that often has more purchasing power than men.

In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pinterest said revenue grew around 60 percent in 2018 while net losses more than halved to $63 million. Rival Snap lost $514.6 million in the year leading up to its IPO. Pinterest also disclosed in the filing that two of its co-founders, Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, get restricted stock worth as much as $39.7 million each. Of Pinterest investors, Bessemer Venture Partners stands to benefit the most from the Pinterest IPO. The venture capital firm first made an investment in May of 2011, when the company was valued at a mere $40 million. The stake is now valued at as high as $1 billion.