Shares of PagerDuty Inc. are up 60% after floating on the New York Stock Exchange this morning, giving the incident response provider a solid start in its first day as a publicly traded company.

The strong debut follows a Wednesday initial public offering that saw PagerDuty reel in $218 million from investors. It sold 9.07 million shares at $24 apiece, above the $21 to $23 range originally anticipated for the IPO. The company raised the price target at the last minute following better-than-expected demand on Wall Street.

PagerDuty’s current share price of $38.30 gives it a market capitalization of nearly $2.9 billion, compared with $1.8 billion right after the IPO. The enthusiastic reception to the shares, which trade under the ticker symbol “PD,” comes as good news not just for its stakeholders but also the other tech firms planning to go public this year. That said, the pop also means the company didn’t take home as much as it could have with a higher starting price.

Most of them, including Uber Technologies Inc., are in a similar financial position as PagerDuty, which is growing its topline rapidly but has not yet become profitable. The company lost $41 million in the 12 months ended Jan. 31 while logging revenues of $117.8 million, up 48 percent from a year ago.

PagerDuty sells a cloud-based platform that information technology teams use to notify them about technical problems. The core alerting features are complemented by a set of tools that enable administrators to diagnose what’s causing an issue, as well as find the best way to go about fixing it.

PagerDuty has a user base of more than 350,000 information technology professionals and other workers across 10,000-plus-employee organizations. The company built up this customer footprint in stages, gradually expanding its platform over the years to address more use cases. As PagerDuty Chief Executive Jennifer Tejada (pictured) detailed in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio, “we almost started out more like a consumer app.”

The company slowly but surely positioned itself as a leader in a fast-growing market increasingly contested by larger players. One of PagerDuty’s top rivals, VictorOps Inc., was acquired by Splunk Inc. for $120 million last June. Enterprise software giant Atlassian Corp. Plc. stepped into the ring as well a few months later by buying Opsgenie Inc. in a $295 million deal.

Photo: SiliconANGLE