Snowflake opens at $245 per share in market debut, after pricing IPO at $120

Snowflake shares surged more than 100% in its market debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, in the largest ever software IPO. 

Stock began trading at $245 per share before being halted due to volatility. Snowflake on Tuesday priced shares at $120, higher than the $100 to $110 range it estimated on Monday, and a huge bump from the $75 to $85 range it proposed in a filing last week. 

Snowflake was worth $67.94 billion at its $245 opening price, more than five times its $12.4 billion valuation in February.

The stock trades under the symbol “SNOW.”

Investors anticipated a blockbuster opening for the company that’s generating over $500 million in annualized revenue and grew over 130% in the first half of 2020. The stock received a vote of confidence last week, when Snowflake revealed in a filing that Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce each agreed to buy $250 million of stock at the IPO price in a concurrent private placement. Berkshire Hathaway also agreed to buy 4.04 million shares in a secondary transaction.

Snowflake is growing alongside the major public cloud vendors by providing technology that allows clients to quickly analyze and share vast amounts of data and increase capacity as needed, rather than relying on databases that are tied to hardware. It’s the first of several technology companies to go public this week in one of the busiest stretches of the year, despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Snowflake ranked No. 40 on the 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.

—CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy contributed to this report. 

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