Cybersecurity company Netskope is eying a $7.3 billion valuation after pricing shares at $19 for its upcoming IPO, at the top end of its expected range.

Netskope will start trading on Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NTSK.” The share sale raised $908.2 million.

Earlier this week, Netskope lifted its expected pricing range to between $17 and $19 a share, up from an original range of $15 to $17. The company revealed plans to go public last month.

Netskope’s offering comes amid a hot period for IPO activity after a years-long lull spurred by step inflation and soaring interest rates. The long-overdue resurgence has fueled optimism on Wall Street and in a venture capital industry eager for return on investment.

Ticket reseller StubHub slid 6% it its first day of trading Wednesday, but a lackluster start may not be reason for concern. CoreWeave went public in March and closed flat in its first day, with shares going on to triple.

Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna jumped 15% in its debut this month. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also jumped since their recent market debuts.

The cybersecurity sector is also undergoing a busy stretch for dealmaking fueled by ongoing artificial intelligence advancements and a shifting threat landscape.

This year’s biggest tech deals include Google’s whopping $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cloud security startup Wiz and Palo Alto Network‘s $25-billion CyberArk buyout. Thoma Bravo-backed SailPoint went public in February after the private equity firm took it private in 2022. Cybersecurity competitors CrowdStrike and Zscaler have also made acquisitions this year to beef up their offerings.

Santa Clara, California-based Netskope was founded in 2012 and is led by co-founder and CEO Sanjay Beri. At the end of July, the company said it had 2,910 employees and 4,317 customers across 90 countries.

Netskope says it competes in the IT security vendor and networking space against the likes of Broadcom, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.

Annual recurring revenues rose 33% to $707 million at the end of July and revenues reached $328 million for the six months ended July 31. The company also reported a net loss of $170 million during that period.

Some of Netskope’s significant backers include Accel, Iconiq and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

WATCH: Some of the recent IPO offerings have been ‘frothy’, says Tastylive’s Tom Sosnoff

Two years ago, Nscale was a brand new startup in the U.K. that had yet to raise any outside funding or officially announce its existence.

Last year the London-based company came out of stealth, and in December announced that it had raised its Series A fundraising, totaling $155 million.

Now, Nscale finds itself at the center of the action in the hottest market on the planet: artificial intelligence. And it has close to $700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.

In press releases on Tuesday, Nscale was named as an AI infrastructure partner for Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI, as the companies expand their buildouts in the U.K. Nscale then said it signed a five-year $6.2 billion agreement with Microsoft and Aker to develop “hyperscale AI infrastructure” in Europe, specifically Norway, where Aker is headquartered.

OpenAI made prior headlines with Nscale, announcing plans in July for a data center in Norway for a Stargate-branded AI data center. Nscale agreed to commit $1 billion for the project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027.

It’s a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn’t even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. At that time, what’s now Nscale was part of Arkon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining. Nscale was spun out to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

Like CoreWeave, which went public this year and now sports a market cap of $58 billion, Nscale is combining data center space, power and lots of GPUs with its own software in order to an provide end-to-end service for AI infrastructure.

CoreWeave, which supplies infrastructure to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and OpenAI, also has roots in crypto. Founded in 2017, the company built up its initial fleet of Nvidia GPUs for ethereum mining before pivoting to AI.

Nscale didn’t respond to a request for comment following this week’s announcements, but CEO Josh Payne, who previously founded Arkon, told CNBC in late July that the company was targeting two big problems in Europe. One is a lack of sufficient computing capacity and the other is a “very fragmented market.”

“What the continent needs is large AI infrastructure projects deploying compute [power],” Payne said, after the announcement with OpenAI for the Norway buildout. “The ecosystem can consume from the project to build AI products, to generate productivity growth and economic benefit.”

Payne wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that the agreement with Microsoft and Aker is a “huge win for European-owned AI infrastructure.”

Europe has been pushing the concept of “sovereign AI,” requiring data centers and AI workloads to be located and processed on European soil. Nscale has quickly emerged as an important player in the U.K.’s bid to evolve into a global leader in AI. In January, Britain laid out an AI “action plan,” promising to reduce bureaucracy to help its domestic AI sector thrive.

While Nscale is addressing the European market, many of its early partners are big U.S. AI vendors. They timed their announcements on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K.

On Wednesday, Trump visited Windsor Castle and met with King Charles, Queen Camilla and other members of the royal family. His trip comes at a contentious moment for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is under pressure to bring stability to the country after the exit of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner over a house tax scandal and a major cabinet reshuffle.

Microsoft headlined the U.K. announcements, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment. The software giant said it plans to work with Nscale to construct what will become the U.K.’s largest supercomputer in Loughton, a suburban town in the English county of Essex.

The site will initially house 23,040 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to be delivered in the first quarter of 2027. When it goes live, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90 megawatts, according to a statement from Nscale.

“No one can make that kind of capital investment unless they’ve got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete, and that’s the role we’re playing,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said Tuesday, adding the deal represents a major vote of confidence in Nscale.

OpenAI said it would launch a U.K. version of Stargate through a partnership with Nscale and Nvidia. OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the project’s first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to approximately 31,000 GPUs over time.

Stargate U.K. will operate across a number of sites in the country — one of the early ones being Cobalt Park, an industrial state in the Northern English city Newcastle. Stargate was initially spawned in the U.S. in January as part of President Trump’s effort to push investments in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia’s announcement on Tuesday included an investment of up to £11 billion ($15 billion) with Nscale and CoreWeave to boost U.K. AI infrastructure.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang separately revealed on Wednesday that the chipmaker had made a £500 million ($683 million) equity investment into Nscale.

“We convinced ourselves that Nscale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the U.K.,” Huang told journalists at a press conference in London.

Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC that Nscale is “a key part of Nvidia’s push in the U.K. market and an acknowledgment by the government that it has to do something to get the AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog.”

After exiting stealth in May of last year, Nscale’s first public announcement came two months later, when the company partnered with UAE’s Open Innovation AI to deploy 30,000 GPUs. Around the same time, Nscale said it was acquiring Kontena, which was founded in 2018 and specialized in high-performance computing data centers.

The next month, Nscale announced an agreement with Asian telecom company Singtel to offer a “GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS),” and serve customers in Europe and Southeast Asia. Initially, Nscale’s infrastructure relied on GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices. Today, the startup promotes various offerings from market leader Nvidia.

Nscale’s big financing landed in December, when the company said it raised $155 million in a round led by Sandton Capital Partners, with participation from Kestrel0x1, Blue Sky Capital Managers and Florence Capital.

Sandton co-founder Rael Nurick said in the press release that with its “unique vertically integrated approach, Nscale is building the hyperscale AI platform to power AI at scale.”

Nscale said at the time that it had grown its AI data center pipeline to 1.3 gigawatts from 300 megawatts the prior year to and that it was aiming to have 350,000 GPUs running by the end of 2027.

By comparison, CoreWeave said at a banking conference last week that its portfolio consists of “about 2.2 gigawatts of capacity that’s coming online.” The company said in its IPO prospectus in March that its 32 data centers were running 250,000 GPUs.

It’s been a whirlwind few years for Payne, Nscale’s founder. While he was serving as executive chairman of Arkon, he was also operating chief at Australia’s Battery Future Acquisition Corp., a blank check company that says it’s “targeting critical battery minerals and related supply chains.”

He’s got a lot of work in front of him.

Building out AI data centers with costly GPUs is a capital intensive process that’s historically required a hefty amount of debt. CoreWeave had raised a total of $12.4 billion in debt through the end of 2024, in addition to well over $1 billion in equity financing before its IPO. It announced a $1.5 billion bond sale in July after a $2 billion debt offering in May.

Nscale was trying to raise $1.8 billion earlier this year through a private credit deal led by bankers at Goldman Sachs, according to Bloomberg.

In the December video tied to Nscale’s equity fundraising, Payne called it “one of the largest Series As raised in U.K., European history.” He said the company would use the cash to deploy up to another 4,000 GPUs in its data center in Norway and to develop up to 180 megawatts of capacity in the company’s portfolio.

The aim, Payne said, was to deploy 50,000 GPUs by the end of 2025 and 150,000 by the end of next year.

“The key challenges that we see in the market is the significant increase in density at the GPU level,” he said. “This funding allows us to scale up materially” he said, and to become “one of the largest players in Europe.”

WATCH: OpenAI restructuring clears hurdle

StubHub shares opened at $25.35 in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday after the online ticket seller priced its IPO in the middle of its expected range.

The pricing late Tuesday at $23.50 per share raised $800 million for the company, now trading under ticker symbol “STUB.”

StubHub’s long-awaited IPO comes after the company paused its plans in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin. It was the second such delay, after market volatility forced StubHub to temporarily shelve its IPO plans in July 2024.

The IPO is the latest in a flurry of tech offerings as the market rebounds from a dismal few years. Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna and Gemini, the crypto firm founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, rose in their respective debuts last week. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also hit the market in recent months.

StubHub has been through a number of transactions in its 25-year history to get to this point. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.

StubHub has benefited from a resurgence in the live events market in the years following the Covid lockdowns. Sales have also boomed from massively popular shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, as well as sporting events like the Super Bowl.

The company said in its updated prospectus filed last month that those sorts of events can also make StubHub’s revenues lumpy and difficult to predict.

In the first quarter, StubHub reported revenue growth of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago. Gross merchandise sales, which represent the total dollar value paid by ticket buyers, reached $2.08 billion in the three months ended March 31.

StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. More than 40 million tickets were sold on StubHub’s marketplace last year from roughly one million sellers, the company said in August.

It competes with Vivid Seats, which was taken public via a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster parent Live Nation Entertainment.

The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of probing Ticketmaster over whether it’s done enough to keep automated bots from circumventing its per-person ticket limits for popular events, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The FTC in May sent a warning letter to StubHub saying it must comply with the agency’s “junk fees” rule and alleging some of its ticket listings failed to display the total price, including all mandatory fees and charges.

Madrone Partners is StubHub’s largest investor with ownership of 24.5% of Class A shares prior to the offering. WestCap is second at 12.3%, followed by Bessemer Venture Partners at 8.8%.

WATCH: StubHub CEO on IPO