Shares in the company that owns Snapchat have soared after it was listed on the US stock market this morning.
Traders at the New York Stock during the Snap Inc. float. Photo: AFP
In the opening minutes of trading its price hit $US24.48 a share, a jump of about 40 percent.
The firm's inital public offering (IPO) is the biggest for an American tech firm since Facebook in 2012 and will turn the company's founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, into multi-billionaires.
The flotation valued the company at $US17 a share, or $US24bn in all, although Snap has never made a profit.
The company's losses widened last year, and user growth is slowing down in the face of intense competition from larger rivals such as Facebook.
Unlike in most listed companies, people who buy the floated shares in Snap will not get any voting rights.
Nicole Bullock, the US equities correspondent for the Financial Times, people were excited about the float because there had been a drought of big tech companies listing for the last few years.
But some analysts believed the company had been significantly overvalued.
"Last year it lost half a billion dollars, so that takes you to the question of whether all of this is appropriate, and will remains to be seen" - Financial Times correspondent Nicole Bullock
"The investors that we spoke to who were interested in buying the shares said that it was really a bet on the managment's ability to ... segue this company into a lasting concern."
Analyst Brian Wieser from Pivotal Research said it was a "promising early stage company with significant opportunity ahead of itself" but was "significantly overvalued given the likely scale of its long-term opportunity and the risks associated with executing against that opportunity".
He gave it a "sell" rating.
Others were more positive.
Before the trading debut, Jordan Hiscott, chief trader at Ayondo Markets, said: "What sets it apart from other messaging apps like WhatsApp for me is the innovative features built into the app's interface, such as the lenses function.
"A pertinent point in the company's S1 filing for the IPO is that it doesn't call itself a messaging service, but a camera company."
"This seems to be an intentional move to differentiate it from Facebook and Twitter and the success and failure of their respective IPOs, which in my view, is very clever."
- BBC / RNZ