The Brooklyn-based online craft marketplace Etsy opened its first day of trading on the Nasdaq at $31, above its IPO price of $16, valuing the company at $3.4 billion. It ended the day with its shares at $30 and a market capitalization of $3.3 billion.
The company priced its offering Wednesday night, raising $267 million.
About $213 million of that will go directly to Etsy, giving the company a big war chest for expansion. The rest will go to some of the company's early investors.
While $1.9 billion of business was done on Etsy in 2014, the company has posted net losses in two of the past three years. Revenue, however, has jumped 68% and 56% per year in the past two years. The company had $195 million in revenue in 2014.
While Etsy is one of many technology companies to go public in the last few years, it is by far the biggest "B Corporation" to list its shares. This certification is won by meeting standards set out by the B Lab. Patagonia is another prominent B Corp.
B Corporations use their businesses to "solve social and environmental problems," Etsy says.
The company said that $300,000 of the proceeds from selling shares will go to Etsy.org, a nonprofit "dedicated to educating women and other under-represented entrepreneurial populations."
In many ways, Etsy's IPO was perfectly normal; it was lead by a trio of investment banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen and Company. Etsy did, however, have a program that allowed its merchants to buy up to 5% of its shares being offered.
The biggest winners from the IPO, however, are big venture capital firms Accel Partners, Index Ventures, and Union Square Ventures. The three firms sold shares worth about $50 million in the IPO.
This piece has been updated with Etsy's closing stock price.