Pinterest IPO: Share Price Set At $19, Higher Than Proposed Range

Pinterest begins trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange and has set its IPO at a high-end $19 a share instead of its original proposed range of $15 to $17.

The strategy worked and the “visual discovery site” enters Wall Street with $1.43 billion in its pocket from its successful IPO. The money raised from Pinterest’s IPO, however, pales in comparison to the $12 billion valuation it attained in a 2017 financing round.

Analysts said the strong demand for Pinterest’s IPO might ease investor concerns about the slew of tech firms wanting to IPO this year after Lyft's bothering post-Wall Street debut performance two weeks ago. Lyft’s stock opened at $56.50 a share on Wednesday, more than 20% below its IPO price of $72.

Pinterest was in the black in the fourth quarter of 2018. For the full-year 2018, Pinterest’s said its revenue jumped 60 percent to $756 million. It said it’s significantly moving closer to profitability with a net loss of $63 million last year. This loss compares very favorably with other tech giants such as Uber, which lost $1.8 billion in 2018.

The site currently has 265 million monthly users. Pinterest doesn’t disclose its number of daily active users unlike Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. That’s because it does "not anticipate that most of our users" will use the service everyday.

Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra. Sharp and Sciarra have since left the fitm.

Silbermann’s stake is now worth close to $1 billion at the offer price. Major shareholders are Bessemer Ventures, which owns shares valued at $1.13 billion, FirstMark’s holdings are worth $844 million, while Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is worth $827 million.

Since its inception, Pinterest has has sought to evolve from a digital scrapbooking service to a visual discovery site, which will make it a potential competitor to market leader, Google Search.