(Bloomberg) — Language learning app Duolingo Inc. rose as much as 42% in its trading debut after a $521 million initial public offering priced above a marketed range.
Shares of the education technology company opened trading Wednesday at $141 after pricing in the IPO at $102. The company and some of its investors sold 5.1 million shares Tuesday for $102 each after marketing them for $95 to $100.
Duolingo was up 33% to $135.60 at 1:07 p.m. in New York trading, giving the company a market value of $4.87 billion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted stock units, it has a fully diluted value of more than $5.9 billion.
The Pittsburgh-based company was started by two engineers, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, who will each have about 15% of the shareholder voting power in the company after the IPO, according to the company’s filings. The two met at Carnegie Mellon University, where von Ahn was a professor in the computer science department and Hacker was a student.
Duolingo’s losses and revenue mounted during the coronavirus pandemic. It had a net loss of $13 million on revenue of $55 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021, compared with a net loss of $2.2 million on revenue of $28 million for the same period a year earlier.
The offering was led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Allen & Co. The shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol DUOL.
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