Financing and initial public offering

he first funding for Google as a company was secured in the form of a USD100,000 contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.[21] Around six months later, a much larger round of funding was announced, with the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[21]

Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of USD85 per share.[22] Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised USD1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[23] The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.[24]

Google's post-IPO stock performance has been very good as well, with shares surging to USD500 by 2007, due to strong sales and earnings in the advertising market, as well as the release of new features like the desktop search function and personalized home page.[25] The surge in stock price is fueled primarily by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[25]

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.