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Yelp IPO: Stock set to begin trading tomorrow at $15

The San Francisco-based company aims to sell 7.15 million shares and raise $107.25 million.

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Paul Sloan is editor in chief of CNET News. Before joining CNET, he had been a San Francisco-based correspondent for Fortune magazine, an editor at large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior producer for CNN. When his fingers aren't on a keyboard, they're usually on a guitar. Email him here.
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Add Yelp to the growing list of freshly public tech companies.

The local-reviews site today set its initial trading price at $15 a share, a little higher than observers had expected, valuing the company at $898 million.

Yelp's revenue, achieved by selling ads to local businesses, climbed 74 percent to $83.3 million in 2011. However, its losses widened to $16.7 million from a year-earlier loss of $9.7 million as total costs and expenses rose. The company says it doesn't expect to be profitable in the near term because it's still focused on investing in the business.

Yelp will join the ranks of newly public tech firms such as Zynga, Groupon and LinkedIn. It's also going out at a time when the Nasdaq is on a tear. The index, up about 14 percent this year, crossed 3,000 yesterday for the first time since Dec. 2000.