Shares of enterprise search engine firm Elasticsearch BV jumped 94 percent today on their first day of trading after the company’s initial public offering.

On Thursday, the company had set the price of its shares at $36 ahead of its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, above its previously anticipated range of $26 to $29. The IPO raised $252 million on the sale of 7 million shares, with an option for underwriters to sell 1.05 million more.

Today the shares, which trade under the ticker symbol ESTC, shot up from the start of trading, closing at an even $70 a share. That implies a market valuation of just under $5 billion.

The firm, founded in 2012 in Amsterdam with a U.S. headquarters now in Mountain View, California, is best known as the maker of the Elasticsearch search engine, which indexes internal data for enterprise users in a similar way to which Google LLC indexes the internet.

The Elastic Stack comes with a number of data management tools, including the Kibana visualization tool, the Logstack engine for ingesting records from external sources and Beats, another data aggregation system.

Notably, Elastic’s core offerings are open source. The company makes money with a commercial version that includes advanced features for enterprises, including a machine learning capability added last year that can find anomalies in real-time data streams.

In its latest quarter ended July 31, Elastic reported a net loss of $18.6 million, nearly double the loss of the previous quarter, on revenue of $56.6 million, up 79 percent from a year ago.

Nicolas Dessaigne, co-founder and chief executive officer of search technology firm Algolia Inc., told SiliconANGLE in an email that data and personalization technologies now sit at the core of what he describes as the digital revolution.

“Customers today want to feel catered to — and we’re seeing enterprises awaken to this movement and invest in technologies that will help them predict what their customers want before they even know it themselves,” Dessaigne said. “This shift is manifesting itself on Wall Street with the recent successful IPO of SurveyMonkey for targeting and segmentation, and today’s IPO from Elastic on the customer engagement front.”

The offering follows a stream of tech IPOs this year that showed big first-day pops in prices. Upwork jumped 41 percent on its first day of trading Wednesday, and last week SurveyMonkey saw its shares jump 43 percent on their first day out last week.

Coming into its IPO, Elastic had raised $162 million from investors that include Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Index Ventures, SV Angel and Data Collective.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Elasticsearch/Twitter