Carsharing service ZipCar began the morning of its IPO trading at $18 a share and is now up to $27.96, a rise of over 50%. Based on its 38.6M total shares this means that it is now a billion dollar company (Congrats ZipCar!). Zipcar has raised $174 million in its IPO , surpassing its original target of $75 million.
The Massachusetts-based ZipCar provides it over 560,000 members with self-service vehicles, operating on 150 college campuses and 13 major metropolitan areas in the United States, the UK and Canada. As Fortune’s Dan Primack points out, the value each actual ZipCar (in a fleet of about 8500) is around $120k when divided into the company’s market cap.
Other notable billion dollar IPOs for startups include Google and Demand Media’s. Reservations service OpenTable hit $600M and Amazon hit $438 million on their first days.
Despite this morning’s success, ZipCar is not yet profitable and heavy operations costs like gas and car maintenance swallowed up about $122.6 million, or about 66% of the company’s $186.1 million in 2010 revenue.
ZipCar has a total of $60.7 million in funding from Revolution Living, Globespan Capital, Benchmark Capital Partners, Greylock Partners and Smedvig Capital.