Snowflake opened at $245, after pricing its shares at $120, far above the original range of $75-$85 from last week, and closed at over $250
- Snowflake began trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. — Stock began trading at $245 per share. — Snowflake begins trading in the biggest software IPO ever
CNBCJessica Bursztynsky
Context & Ripple Effects
Snowflake's debut capped a week of escalating numbers: the $3.4B raise was already the largest software IPO ever at a $44B-plus valuation when bankers lifted the range to $120, and Wednesday's $245 open means public buyers paid roughly double what allocated institutions paid the night before.
Early backers' paper gains more than double on day one: Sutter Hill's $5.9B stake at the $120 IPO price is worth over twice that at the $245 open.
Snowflake banks $3.4B but sells its shares at roughly half the opening print, handing the spread between $120 and $245 to allocated institutions instead of the balance sheet.
Second-order effects
The doubling gives every banker shepherding a cloud-software issuer through the same pipeline evidence that public demand clears far above the final price, validating aggressive range hikes.
Public-market funds paying $245 inherit growth expectations private holders never had to price, a transfer of risk that surfaces the moment Snowflake reports its first quarter.
Third-order effects
That first report set the terms of the bargain: $159.6M in revenue up 119% YoY alongside a $169.5M operating loss — hypergrowth bought with spend, exactly what the IPO premium demanded.
Years later the stock's best day still traced back to this framing, closing up 36% on a guidance boost and an AI compute deal with Amazon — the record IPO becoming an AI-momentum story rather than a steady-state cash generator.
The trend: Record software debuts are repricing cloud data platforms overnight, converting private backers' cheap equity into public-market obligations measured in triple-digit revenue growth.
Some encouragement to comment on $SNOW IPO. While it would be easy to do normal post wrt mispricing, it is important to understand what is different here from other IPOs. The most important data is broad (40 years of underpricing, 2020 worst year yet), vs. 1 company. [cont]
Seeing $SNOW at $260, which implies a $72bn valuation and a 135x NTM EV/S multiple makes me think DeFi valuations aren't so crazy. https://twitter.com/...
Snowflake more than doubles in market debut, largest ever software IPO https://www.cnbc.com/... Makes USD 1 billion profits for Warren Buffett on the way .
The IPOs these days are nothing like the IPOs of late 90s. For as much as people are paying for $SNOW, it's a real, rapidly growing company winning deals. The crap people were going nuts for back then (VA Linux, Sycamaore etc.) were nowhere near as established businesses.
https://www.cnbc.com/... Snowflake IPO, the first ever US IPO subscribed by Berkshire Hathway in almost 6 decades, debuts today. Up ~1.5x from its issue price and 8x from its pre IPO valuation. Now valued at a really cheap valuation of 200x CY20E Sales.
Snowflake IPOing as the world's largest software IPO is showing that markets for enterprise software continue to be far larger than most anticipate. With exponential growth in data, devices, and apps, something already big today might be 100X bigger in just a few years.