Lyft Valued at $22.4 Billion After Rising in Trading Debut

Lyft, the No. 2 U.S. ride-hailing company, jumped in its debut after raising $2.34 billion in an IPO that priced at the top of an elevated range, according to Bloomberg. This sends an encouraging signal to the stampede of Silicon Valley companies lining up to go public this year.

Shares opened Friday morning at $87.24, 21 percent above the IPO price of $72, and drifted downward in the afternoon, closing up 8.7 percent to $78.29 in New York. That gives the company a market value of about $22.4 billion.

After Lyft’s co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer rang the Nasdaq opening bell from a driver center in Los Angeles, shares took more than two hours to start trading. Zimmer said they decided to forgo the traditional opening ceremony on the floor of the exchange to be with the company’s drivers. Green and Zimmer will maintain near-majority control of the company through Class B shares that carry the voting rights of 20 ordinary shares.

San Francisco-based Lyft sold 32.5 million shares after initially marketing 30.8 million shares at $62 to $68 each. It increased the range to $70 to $72 the day before the IPO was set to price. Shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker LYFT.

This month, Lyft disclosed in its IPO filing with the SEC that it lost $911 million on revenue of $2.2 billion in 2018. That compared with a loss of $688 million on revenue of $1.1 billion the previous year. Investors didn’t seem to mind that the company was losing money. Last week, after just two days of marketing to investors, Lyft’s listing was oversubscribed. By Friday, Lyft ended up selling more shares than planned at the top of an already elevated price range.

Of the 22 tech and internet companies that have raised $1 billion or more in U.S. IPOs, Lyft ranks seventh at $2.34 billion. That was just behind last year’s $2.42 billion listing by the Chinese video service iQIYI and ahead of Twitter’s $2.09 billion offering in 2013. Alibaba tops the list at $25 billion in 2014, the largest ever U.S. IPO, followed by Facebook’s $16 billion listing in 2012.