Fitbit goes public without breaking a sweat
Fitness tracker maker Fitbit went public Thursday, and was received surprisingly well. The stock went up 50 percent as soon as trading began, ending the day at $29.68 a share.
“We’re at a scale of revenue and profitability that we felt it made a lot of sense to go public,” says Fitbit CEO James Park.
In 2014, the company reported $745 million in revenue — proving that people will spend a lot of money on wearable technology.
“There’s a lot of great things that we can do with the capital that we raise from the IPO. There’s a lot of advanced research and development that we can do on our products ranging from, more hardware to more incredible software to make people healthier,” Park says. “We started investing in pretty significant sales and marketing campaigns. Fitbit is pretty much already synonymous with health and fitness tracking — we’re almost a ‘Kleenex’ of the category.”
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