MORRISVILLE – Liquidia Technologies Inc. saw its stock jump slightly Thursday, its first day as a publicly traded company, after raising $50 million in its initial public offering.

The Morrisville, North Carolina-based biopharmaceutical company, which focuses on developing treatments using its particle engineering platform, closed at $11.10 per share, a 0.9 percent increase from its IPO price of $11.

Liquidia opened trading hup 13.2 percent at $12.45. Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker LQDA, the company saw its stock jump as high as 22 percent to $13.43 per share in its opening day.

Nearly 1.8 million shares were traded Thursday.

When it initially filed for its IPO, the company had hoped to raise $57.5 million. It sold 4.5 million shares in the IPO.

Liquidia has stated in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings that “management will retain broad discretion” in its use of proceeds from the IPO, and that actual expenditures may vary based on things such as the progress of commercialization efforts and the success rate of clinical trials.

The company also said it may use some of the proceeds to in-license, acquire or invest in complementary businesses, assets and treatment technologies.

Jefferies LLC and Cowen & Co. are the joint book-running underwriters of the IPO. Other underwriters are Needham & Co. and Wedbush Securities.

The underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 681,818 additional shares of common stock at the IPO price.

Liquidia is a nanotechnology company that designs, develops and manufactures precisely engineered particles and films for various life and material science applications.

The company raised $25.5 million in a private equity offering in February. One of its largest shareholders, according to SEC filings, is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which owns 13.4 million shares, or 7.5 percent of Liquidia.

In its SEC filing, Liquidia stated that it is “primarily dependent” on the successful development and commercialization of its lead product, LIQ861, and another of its drug product candidates, LIQ865. The company intends to execute Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical trials for them during 2018.

This story is from the North Carolina Business News Wire, a service of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism