Zynga IPO Prices At $10, The Upper End Of Its Range, But Under The Last Private Round

Zynga priced its IPO at $10 a share, according to Bloomberg and CNBC (bankers love to leak). The IPO, which is set for tomorrow, will be in the upper end of the $8.50 to $10 price range the company indicated previously in SEC filings.

Zynga will sell at least 100 million shares, raising $1 billion at a $7 billion valuation. The valuation is about half of where early reports were speculating it would be, but Zynga lowered the price in the face of the tepid performance of other tech IPOs lately and general economic concerns weighing down the stock market. Even with the lower price, Zynga is poised to open trading with a bigger market cap bigger than LinkedIn, which currently is at $6.4 billion.

Zynga’s investment baankers can tap into an extra 15 million shares if there is additional demand for them at the IPO price. Investors including Kleiner Perkins, IVP, Union Square Ventures, Foundry, DST, Avalon, Google, SilverLake, and Tiger Global could be getting a payday tomorrow if they sell a portion of their shares as part of the offering.

Investors such as Kleiner Perkins who participated in Zynga’s last private $485 million mega-round in February, 2011 will actually stil be underwater. According to a table in the S-1 filing, Kleiner bought 1.8 million shares at $14 in what was technically the Series C.

But Keiner will do just fine. It bought the vast majority of its shares—another 24.7 million— back in July 2008 at $0.42 a share.