Castlight IPO Flies Out of the Gate

In its first day of public trading, shares for Castlight Health, a San Francisco-based provider of an application that allows consumers of healthcare to compare doctors, rose an impressive 138 percent percent to $38.25 from the initial price of $16.

The stock price reached as high as $41.25 during the first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CSLT.

Castlight sold 11.1 million initial shares of the stock following the offering, which raised $178 million for the company. In addition, the company granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,665,000 additional shares of Class B common stock from Castlight Health at the initial public offering price.

"We're doing this financing in order to meet the demands of our rapidly growing customer base of more than 100 enterprises and to continue to innovative on our technology platform, which we call the Enterprise Healthcare Cloud," CEO Giovanni Colella, M.D., said to USA Today. 

Castlight was founded in 2008 by Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. and former CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and co-founder of EHR vendor, athenahealt. Over the past few years, Castlight received several rounds of venture capital; in 2012, it raised $100 million.

Castlight was named by noted healthcare economist Uwe Reinhardt, Ph.D. as one of the companies that is changing the way consumers interact with healthcare organizations in regards to pricing. It was named as one of the top VC funded companies by The Wall Street Journal in 2011.