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CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.’s first day as a public company is off with a bang.

The cybersecurity provider started trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange this morning at $63.50 a share, up 85% over the pricing of its initial public offering Tuesday night. Update: It closed up 70% Wednesday, and then rose 16% more on Thursday.

CrowdStrike raked in $612 million during the IPO after selling 18 million shares for $34 apiece. The company was aiming for $28 to $30, a target it had raised from the original $19 to $23 range after seeing stronger-than-expected investor interest.

The large pop means the company left a lot of money on the table that it could have pocketed had it priced shares higher. But a big first-day jump is also seen as a sign of confidence by investors.

Sunnyvale, California-based CrowdStrike is one of the biggest names in the endpoint security market. The company sells a cloud-based breach prevention platform called Falcon that uses machine learning to protect the devices connected to enterprises’ networks. It can scan for malicious activity across servers, employee-owned handsets and workstations, as well as lower-powered systems such as printers.

Falcon is powered by a detection engine that processes 100 billion security-related events per day. Besides hunting for breaches, the platform also helps administrators find weak points in their networks such as devices set up by users without authorization.

CrowdStrike disclosed in its IPO prospectus that Falcon is deployed at more than 2,500 organizations worldwide, including a fifth of the Fortune 500. Moreover, demand for the platform continues to grow at a breakneck pace: CrowdStrike more than doubled revenues in the year ended Jan. 31 to $249.8 million.

The company’s sales momentum stands out even by the standards of the fast-growing security market, which is one reason concerns about profitability didn’t hurt its IPO. Like most of the other tech firms that have gone public recently, CrowdStrike is losing money. It lost $140 million in the 12 months through Jan. 31, up from $135 million the year before and $91 million before that.

CrowdStrike’s strong trading debut stands in contrast with some of the other high-profile tech IPOs that took place so far this year. Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., whose listings were expected to be among the highlights of 2019, are currently trading well below their public offering prices.

There were also success stories: Pinterest Inc. rose 25% after hitting the stock market in late April while Zoom Video Communications Inc., which went public on the same day as the social network, saw its shares soar as much as 80%.

The next company set to join the roster is Slack Technologies Inc., whose unusual direct listing is expected to take place later this month. The team chat provider is closer to CrowdStrike than Uber or Lyft as far as its finances are concerned, which could bode well for its IPO. Slack’s revenues jumped 81% in the last fiscal year, to $220 million, while slightly narrowing losses from $140.1 million to $138.9 million.

Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer, spoke last year with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, at Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AWS Summit last summer in Washington D.C., about how the company views the cybersecurity market:

Photo: Nasdaq