Teladoc, the Dallas-based consumer telehealth company, had an impressive debut on Wall Street with shares trading up 50 percent its initial public offering (IPO).
The company, which has had its share of recent legal entanglements, offered stock at $19 a share on the NASDAQ. By the end of its first day of trading, the stock was trading at more than $28 per share, more than 50 percent its initial value. Whatever issues Teladoc has with the Texas Board of Medicine and its competitor, American Well, investors don’t seem to care.
While Teladoc is the first telehealth-specific company to go public, it’s not the first health IT to launch an IPO this year. Earlier this year, Inovalon, a Bowie, Md.-based clinical analytics firm, raised $600 million in its IPO after pricing its 22.2 million class A shares at $27 per share. In 2014, six companies in health IT had IPOs and raised billions. The most prominent were Premier, with its $760 million IPO, Castlight, with an IPO valued at $1 billion, and IMS Health, a Danbury, Conn.-based analytics company raised $1.3 billion.
