Groupon Inc has priced its initial public offering at $20 a share Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

This pricing is above the estimated range of $16 to $18 and added 5 million shares to the deal, indicating a  strong investor demand that landed the 3 year old Chicago Company a valuation of about $12.7 billion.

The trading of the shares will begin today. Groupon will debut on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol GRPN.

The price and increased deal size reflects the strong demand from investors for what has been a controversial offering, with questions circulating about the company’s business strategy, accounting and management turnover.

About 35 million shares were sold in the offering, which will raise about $700 million for Groupon. This lifted the float size from the 5% level for which the company had faced some criticism, but only to approximately 5.5%.

Groupon plans to use the funds for general corporate purposes but has claimed it has enough cash in its existing bank account to fund operations for the next 12 months. Groupon sells online discount coupons to its email base of nearly 143 million subscribers.

The offers called Groupon offer deep discounts for services and products from local merchants. Groupon has grown rapidly in its brief life span, with revenue of $430.2 million for the quarter ended September 30, up more than 5-fold from the same period a year before.

Net losses totaled $10.6 million in the most recent period. Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website featuring discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies.

The company was launched in November 2008 and the first market for Groupon was Chicago.