Card Issuer Marqeta Valued At More Than $17B in Nasdaq Debut

Shares of Marqeta, an Oakland-based modern card issuing platform, popped on the first day of trading Wednesday, closing at $30.52 per share, up 13 percent from opening price of $27. Marqeta is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol MQ.

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Marqeta now has a market value of $17.3 billion, according to Yahoo, which is based on 586 million of outstanding shares.

The company filed in May to go public via an initial public offering. Since its inception in 2010 by Jason Gardner, Marqeta has raised a total of $528 million in known venture capital, according to Crunchbase data. Its last disclosed round in May 2020 valued the company at $4.3 billion.

Vidya Peters, chief marketing officer for Marqeta, told Crunchbase News that the IPO “has been a wonderful validation of the modern card issuing industry and what we have done over the last decade.”

She went on to say that there is a “massive $74 trillion market opportunity ahead of us, which provides an endless runway.”

And, as a payments infrastructure company, being publicly traded enables Marqeta to be transparent on its financial health to stakeholders and customers.

“It also provides a massive arsenal to accelerate our product roadmap and fuel our global expansion,” Peters added. “We are already in 36 countries and now we can accelerate even faster.”

To complement prepaid and debit card offerings, in the past year Marqeta added credit, which Peters touted as being the first company to offer all three.

She also believes this is just the start for what Marqeta can enable with innovative offerings, such as open APIs so that developers can build their own card-issuing products.

“Marqeta is just scratching the surface with cards,” Peters added. “Imagine being able to have your check deposited onto your card, buy now, pay later, peer-to-peer payments and even monetize your cryptocurrency. The possibilities are endless, and in our next chapter we are in a position to unlock all of that with our card types.”

Among the S-1 statement disclosures, Marqeta touts customers, such as Affirm, DoorDash, Instacart, Klarna and Square, which it reported was its largest customer, accounting for 70 percent of its net revenue in 2020.

It reported $350 million in fourth-quarter 2020 annualized net revenue, operates in 36 countries, and has issued more than 320 million debit, credit and prepaid cards to date.

The company reported $107.9 million in revenue for the first quarter ended March 30, 2021, more than double from the same three-month period in 2020. It narrowed its net loss to $12.8 million during the quarter from $14.5 million last year.

Prominent backers include 83North II, Coatue, ICONIQ Capital, Granite Ventures and Discover Financial Services, according to its filings. With the exception of Discover, all of the remaining entities led investments into the company, according to Crunchbase data.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias