Bulletins

SoFi shares rally 12% in trading debut

The online lender went the SPAC route.

SoFi CEO Anthony Noto

SoFi shares rallied 12% after becoming a publicly traded company through a SPAC merger.

Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images Sport

Shares of SoFi rallied 12% on Tuesday as the online personal finance company made its debut as a publicly traded company.

SoFi closed at $22.65 on its first trading day on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The company went public via a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp., a SPAC run by venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.

SoFi shares were last up more than 2% in after-hours trading.

The debut marked a milestone for the fintech company founded by four Stanford Graduate School of Business students in 2011, now run by Anthony Noto. SoFi began as a student loan financing company but steadily expanded to other financing products, including personal loans and mortgages.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

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