Pinterest Valuation Tops Nordstrom’s

Pinterest, the image search startup, made its debut as a publicly traded company Thursday (April 18) and was able to close up 28 percent from its IPO price.

According to a report in The New York Times, shares of Pinterest started trading at $23.75, higher than the IPO price of $19 a share. It ended its first day as a public company at $24.40 a share. It now has a market capitalization of more than $16 billion and is valued higher than Macy’s and Nordstrom. It also pushes the company’s valuation above the $12 billion it garnered the last time it raised funding in 2017.  Zoom, the video conferencing company which also went public Thursday, saw its stock jump as much as 80 percent in its first day of trading, ending the day with shares up 72 percent to $62 a share. The company now has a market capitalization of $18 billion, higher than Pinterest.  In an interview with the New York Times, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said the surge in shares adds more pressure to deliver for investors. “I looked at the price this morning and I thought, ‘Wow, I better go back tonight to get back to work,’” he told the paper.  The huge interest in Zoom’s IPO implies that investors are just as giddy for lesser-known software companies that are profitable as they are for app makers targeting consumers. The paper pointed to PagerDuty. It is a less-known, smaller software company. Its stock jumped 60 percent on its first day of trading earlier this month.

The strong showing out of Pinterest and Zoom is a big sigh of relief for investors who had been wearily eyeing the IPO market after Lyft failed to take off once it began trading in late March. The stock surged out of the gate but then slumped and is now trading under its IPO price. Uber, the ride-sharing rival, is expected to launch an IPO in May in what could be the largest one ever.