Financing and initial public offering

The 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.[23] 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.[23]Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share.[24] 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 $1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.[25] 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 owned 8.4 million shares of Google as of August 9, 2004, ten days before the IPO.[26]Google's post-IPO stock performance has been very good as well, with shares surging to $500 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.[27] The surge in stock price is fueled primarily by individual investors, as opposed to large institutional investors and mutual funds.[27]The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.