Lending Club starts trading on the NYSE at a high $24.75 per share

Updated 10:19 a.m. PT with comments from Lending Club’s chief operating officer.

Lending Club this morning kicked off a parade of tech IPOs this week, with executives hitting the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and then watching the stock price soar way above prices they had set. At around 10:41 a.m. Eastern the stock exceeded $25.

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The Financial Times pegged the company’s valuation at $8.9 billion after the IPO.

“It was a positive vote of confidence from investors,” Lending Club chief operating officer Scott Sanborn tells VentureBeat. “But we expect to be measured over the long term.”

The IPO is being closely watched because it was one of the first “sharing economy” companies to go public. The San Francisco-based company, founded by Renaud Laplanche in 2006, connects people who want to borrow and lend money, although financial institutions and banks also provide capital for the loans. The company also recently added small business loans to its lineup.

As part of the IPO, the company set aside a pool of shares that could be purchased by lenders on the platform.

Indeed, there were early indications that investor interest was high. The company — trading now under the symbol LC — had priced the stock yesterday at $15 per charge, above the range of $12 to $14. That gave Lending Club a value of $5.4 billion.

Prior to the IPO, the company, which takes a fee for each transaction, reported that it had $143 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2014. That was up 122 percent from the first nine months for the previous year. Lending Club posted a loss during the first nine months of $24 million.

Over the years, Lending Club had raised more than $62 million from a wide pool of venture capital firms, including Morgenthaler Ventures, Foundation Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Thomvest.

Lending Club has global ambitions, Sanborn tells us, but the company intends to focus on the US market for now.

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Jordan Novet contributed to this story.