Yelp Closes 5-Star IPO Day With $1.47 Billion Valuation

For Yelp, this has been a very good day.

The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. Yelp shares traded at strong prices all day, hitting a high of $26 per share and never falling below its $22 opening price.

It’s a warmer reception than we’ve seen with some other recent web IPOs: Shares of Zynga, for example, dipped below the IPO price within the first minutes of its stock market debut back in December. The fact that Zynga was solidly profitable at the time of its IPO while Yelp is still operating in the red just goes to show how unpredictable the stock market can really be, and how many things are at play when the market is determining a company’s value.

Of course, today is just the first step in Yelp’s new life as a publicly traded company — it’ll be interesting to see how things shake out in the weeks and months ahead. But it’s fair to say that the company’s executives, employees and investors are probably pretty happy with how things have gone so far.