Following the disappointing public offerings of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., content delivery provider Fastly Inc. today debuted on the stock market to a markedly warmer reception.

The company saw its share price jump as much as 58% in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange thanks to strong investor demand. By end of day, Fastly closed up nearly 50%, to $23.99 a share, valuing it at more than $2.2 billion.

The IPO, which took place late Thursday, saw the company raise $180 million after selling 11.25 million shares for $16 apiece. That price was at the top end of the range Fastly had set for the offering.

Fastly operates a content delivery network that helps speed the loading times of online services. The CDN makes copies of websites’ content and stores them in data centers around the world, serving up pages from the location nearest to the user. Fastly also offers a number of value-added features to simplify certain core aspects of running an online service.

The company’s CDN includes security features that protect websites against distributed denial-of-service attacks, bots and other online threats while encrypting users’ connections. There’s also a specialized programming language called Varnish that allows companies to customize the platform for their needs. Organizations can, for instance, fine-tune how certain types of content such as videos are loaded to improve performance.

Fastly disclosed in its IPO filing that its CDN is used by more than 1,600 companies worldwide. Of those, 243 are enterprise customers, a group that accounted for 85 percent of the provider’s revenue in the first quarter.

Fastly grew sales by 40% year-over-year in the three months ended March 31, to $45.6 million, while narrowing losses by 5%, to $9.7 million. For the 2018 fiscal year, it reported a $30.9 million net loss on $144.6 million in revenue.

The fact that the company is rapidly growing its top line while also steadily advancing toward profitability is likely a big reason why it fared better than Uber and Lyft, neither of which has an immediate path out of the red.

Photo: Fastly