UPDATED at 4 p.m. EDT
Mobileye’s IPO on the Nasdaq quickly caught fire Wednesday, jumping 34% in morning trades from its initial price of $21 a share and finishing the day up by 38%.
Each share at market close reached $28.97, arguably an expression of interest in the future of self-driving vehicles despite a slowdown in IPOs generally in recent months.
At $21 a share, sources told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Intel raised $861 million, valuing the company at $17 billion.
Intel paid $15.3 bllion for Intel in 2017 and last year said it expected to raise $50 billion or more with the IPO. Mobileye trades under the symbol MBLY.
Mobileye actually saw an IPO in 2014, raising nearly $900 million, before the Intel purchase in 2017.
Intel announces earnings on Thursday and is widely expected to begin making layoffs because of declining interest in PCs and other electronics.
Initial Public Offerings in the US are having one of the worst years on record, raising the least money since 1995, according to Dealogic. Rising inflation and interest rates, fears of recession and plummeting prices for tech stocks including self-driving car companies are among the main reasons for the decline.
Mobileye’s revenues were $854 million for the first two quarters of the fiscal year, an improvement of 21% over a year earlier.
Crunchbase analyzed 14 self-driving vehicle tech companies that went public over the last two years and found an average 80% decline in the post-IPO valuation.
The biggest drop by dollars was Aurora, which dropped from its IPO valuation of $14 billion to $2.6 billion as of Oct. 10.
Mobileye Founder and CEO Amnon Shashua welcomed the IPO, noting the five years under Intel helped it grow and proper. “[We] are emerging from Intel bigger and stronger, and ready to deliver what you need from driver-assistance technology—everything from today’s popular safety applications to the full autonomous driving solutions of the future,” he said in a letter.
EyeQ, an SoC from Mobileye, is now used in more than 800 vehicle models and 125 million vehicles, he said.
“I am confident in our ability to continue growing and thriving as a publicly traded company,” he added.
RELATED: Intel halves its IPO valuation for Mobileye, report says, as self-driving tech is hit hard