Google’s initial offering price was $85 per share.
Google’s IPO took place on August 19, 2004, after years of rapid growth in web search and online advertising. The company had been founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose earlier search project was known as BackRub. Google incorporated in 1998 and attracted major venture investment from firms including Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.
For its public debut, Google offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 each. The sale raised about $1.67 billion and gave the company a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker GOOG; after Alphabet became Google’s parent company, the stock structure and ticker history continued in a reorganized form.
Google’s offering was unusual because it used an online auction intended to let market demand influence the final price, rather than relying entirely on a conventional investment-bank pricing process. The auction attracted enormous attention, although the final price was below some earlier expectations. The $85 figure refers to the IPO offering price, not the price at which the stock later traded during its first day.