Kingsoft Cloud chairman Lei Jun. Jun is also the CEO of smartphone maker Xiaomi. Photo credit: Jorge Alvaro Manzano | Flickr, under Creative Commons license

On Friday, the 8th of May, Kingsoft Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese software powerhouse Kingsoft, successfully held an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock exchange, raising $510 million from investors in the process. The company’s shares have soared more than 40% since its debut, currently (as of writing) trading for nearly $24 apiece. Kingsoft Cloud’s current valuation amounts to nearly $5 billion. The company sold 30 million American depositary shares for an average price of $17 in its public debut.

U.S. investment banks J.P. Morgan, UBS, and Credit Suisse alongside China’s CICC acted as joint book-runners for Kingsoft Cloud’s IPO.

Kingsoft filed to take its cloud division public in late December of last year. The company’s filing indicated revenues of nearly 4 billion Chinese yuan ($568 million) in 2019. This compares to 2.2 billion yuan ($310 million) in the year before and roughly 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million) in 2017. Even as Kingsoft Cloud has steadily grown its revenue, losses have also followed suit. The company posted about $160 million in losses in 2019 and also posted a similar amount in the preceding year.

Kingsoft Cloud is one of the leading cloud computing providers in China. As a private company under Kingsoft, the cloud division took on nearly $1 billion in outside funding from various investors including Kingsoft itself. Kingsoft controlled a majority stake in the cloud division before its IPO. Other big shareholders in the company include chairman Lei Jun, Jun’s smartphone maker Xiaomi, and Chinese investment firm FutureX Capital.

Kingsoft Cloud currently has about 1,800 employees, the majority being engineers, researchers, programmers, and computer and data scientists.