Shares in advertising technology platform provider The Trade Desk Inc. surged in their stock market debut Wednesday, closing the first day of trading on the NASDAQ at $30.10, up 67 percent from an initial list price of $18.

The company, which offers a self-service platform that enables ad buyers to manage data-driven advertising campaigns across various advertising formats and devices, uses Big Data to power its real-time bidding platform.

Unlike other recent floats, The Trade Desk entered the public market with a somewhat unusual proposition: profits. On revenues of $113.8 million in 2015, on gross billings of $530 million, the company earned a profit for the year of $39.2 million before income taxes. For the first six months of 2016, revenues came in at $77.6 million, up 83 percent from a year ago.

Unlike some of its competitors, The Trade Desk had also managed to diversify its offering away from display advertising, a struggling market segment that has claimed a number of victims of late, the most prominent being Mode Media Inc. last week. The Trade Desk claims that its clients had gone from a gross spend of 100 percent into display advertising in 2011 to 57 percent in 2015, with the remaining 43 percent being allocated to mobile, video and social channels.

Nonetheless, like any company in digital advertising, The Trade Desk faces significant competition from the likes of Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. “To the extent that these risks are not fully appreciated by investors early on, we see a reasonable chance that the stock performs well in the near term before weakening in future quarters,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said in a note to clients.

The initial public offering is likely to have put around $90 million into the company’s bank account, which according to AdExchanger it will use to make “oversized investments in international growth,” with a particular focus on China, and in programmatic television buying.

Big Data

While on the surface The Trade Desk is primarily an advertising technology company, its reliance on Big Data and technology also makes it a broader technology firm as well, so the float and subsequent surge in its stock price is great news for the overall technology sector and those companies looking to go public before the end of the year.

The appetite for technology companies appears to have returned to the market after a relative drought in the first half of this year, and there is more to come. Enterprise virtualization and storage firm Nutanix Inc. is preparing to go public after a nine-month delay, along with cloud software company Coupa Inc.

Going into the IPO, The Trade Desk had raised $82.5 million in traditional venture capital and $125 million in debt financing from firms including Bridge Bank, Double M Partners, Founder Collective, Hermes Growth Partners, IA Ventures, Kortschak Investments, Neu Venture Capital, Opus Bank, Revel Partners, SV Angel, Wellington Management and Wider Wake Networks.

Image credit: The Trade Desk