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By Alexander Davis 

Shares of cybersecurity specialist CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. leapt more than 80% above their initial public offering price in their Wall Street debut, demonstrating investors' continuing appetite for Silicon Valley business software firms.

CrowdStrike shares changed hands at $63.50 apiece in initial trading Wednesday morning on the Nasdaq exchange. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CrowdStrike had priced its shares at $34 apiece, well above its expected range of $28 to $30.

The gains give CrowdStrike, led by co-founder and chief executive George Kurtz, a market value of roughly $12.7 billion. Last year it was valued at $3 billion by private investors. The company previously raised about $481 million from venture firms including Accel, IVP, Alphabet Inc.'s CapitalG and Warburg Pincus, according to PitchBook Data Inc.

The largest pre-IPO shareholders were Warburg Pincus, with 30.2% of shares, Accel with 20.2% and CapitalG with 11.1%.

CrowdStrike's debut comes amid a resurgent IPO market, following high-profile venture-backed tech debuts, including those of Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and Pinterest Inc.

Although several consumer-tech offerings have struggled on Wall Street, a number of business software companies such as Zoom Video Communications Inc. and PagerDuty Inc. have seen their stocks perform well after their IPOs.

CrowdStrike is expanding briskly but continues to lose money. It said in its prospectus it generated $219.4 million in revenue for the 12-month period ending Jan. 31, more than double the $92.5 million in the year-ago period. The company's net loss for that time frame widened slightly to $140.1 million from $135.5 million.

Write to Alexander Davis at alec.davis@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 12, 2019 12:35 ET (16:35 GMT)

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