Lyft hits the stock market, sells shares for $72 in highly anticipated IPO

Lyft might not be the biggest name in the ride-hailing market, but it did become the first to reach a major milestone on Friday.

The San Francisco-based transportation company went public on Friday morning, selling shares for $72 with an early valuation of $24 billion. In doing so, Lyft became the first ride-hailing app to go public, beating chief rival Uber to the market.

With about 48 hours to go before the IPO, Lyft raised its expected share price to anywhere from $70 to $72 in an SEC filing. Lyft ended up settling on the maximum figure of $72 when trading began on the Nasdaq. Its ticker symbol is LYFT.

Lyft rang the bell to open the market remotely from Los Angeles, with LA mayor Eric Garcetti in attendance. The spotlight was on Lyft because it was the biggest tech IPO since Snap went public in early 2017. Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer were also joined by some of the comnpany's drivers on Friday morning.

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If Lyft wants to avoid Snap's trajectory since then, it might need to change things up a bit. The ride-sharing app doesn't make money, with a net loss of nearly $1 billion in 2018 alone. That was despite bringing in more than $2 billion in revenue last year, as Lyft revealed during its IPO filing at the beginning of March.

It also remains to be seen how Lyft will compete with Uber once Uber goes public, too. To poorly paraphrase Game of Thrones, Uber is coming. The biggest ride-sharing app in the U.S. is expected to go public in the coming months, bringing a whopping 66 percent market share to the table, according to data from Edison Trends.

With an infusion of public money and a growing self-driving operation on the way, Lyft probably hopes it can generate some momentum and silence the doubters.