Castlight Health prices IPO at $16, above earlier estimates

Castlight Health has priced its impending IPO shares even higher than its recently revised upward estimate.

The health software company priced itself at $16 per share, so it raised $178 million after unloading 11.1 million shares to investors. That values the company at $1.39 billion at listing price, assuming it doesn’t unleash additional shares onto the market.

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Shares are set to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange later this morning under the ticker “CSLT.”

Institutional investor interest remains high despite Castlight’s major losses. It posted a net loss of $62.2 million in 2013 on revenue of $13 million, largely due to its $33.7 million sales and marketing spend.

As we’ve reported earlier, Castlight Health’s IPO signals a monster year for digital health. Practice Fusion and ZocDoc are both strong candidates to go public next and may be under intense pressure to do so from investors, given that they’ve raised a massive $155 million and $99 million respectively.

“It’s certainly a good time to be in the business of bringing transparency to health care,” said Mitch Rothschild, CEO of Vitals, another company similarly focused on bringing cost and quality transparency to health care. “While the market will ultimately decide the right valuation for companies in our space, public market reception to Castlight and private market endorsement of other companies taking aim at health care’s opaqueness would suggest that investors recognize there is an enormous opportunity in empowering consumers and employees with tools to make informed health care choices.”

Founded in 2008 by three health tech titans — including Todd Park, the United States’ current chief technology officer — San Francisco-based Castlight aims to make health care costs more transparent for companies. It helps self-insured employers create an online (and mobile-friendly) space where employees can shop for health care based on price, quality, and how much of their ­deductible has already been spent.