Pinterest prices IPO at $19 per share, giving it a $10 billion valuation - lower than its $12.3 billion private valuation

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Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann.

• Pinterest priced its IPO at $19 a share on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of $10 billion.
• It's above the range the company originally set for its IPO, though still below its last private funding valuation of $12.3 billion.
• Pinterest is expected to start trading on Thursday on NYSE under the ticker symbol "PINS."

Pinterest, the self-described "visual discovery" platform, priced its IPO at $19 a share on Wednesday, giving it a valuation of $10 billion.

The company is expected to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday under the ticker symbol "PINS." It's joined by another multi-billion dollar unicorn - Zoom, the video conferencing platform, which is also expected to list on Nasdaq on Thursday under the ticker symbol "ZM."

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Pinterest's IPO price is above the $15 to $17 range previously set by the company in a filing on April 8. At the high end of that range, Pinterest would have been valued at $9 billion - far below its most recent private funding round, which gave it a $12.3 billion valuation.

Read more: Pinterest's IPO team wants to convince investors that it has more in common with Google than Snap

In the roadshow leading up to Wednesday night's pricing, Pinterest and its IPO team took pains to differentiate itself from other social media platforms, including Snap, which has struggled to please investors since going public in 2017, a person familiar with the process told Business Insider.

Pinterest's team compared the company to an earlier version of Google, except that its search engine is focused around images, not words.

Pinterest generated $755.9 million in revenue in 2018, up 60% from $472.9 million in 2017. The company lost $63 million in 2018, down from $130 million in losses in 2017, according to its S-1.

In 2018, Pinterest's global average revenue per user was $3.14, up 25% from 2017. In the US, its 2018 ARPU was $9.04, and internationally it was just $0.25. ARPU is a common metric from measuring growth at ad-based businesses.