Shares of Fusion-io Inc., the Cottonwood Heights company that hopes to replace computer hard drives with much faster flash memory technology and claims Apple icon Steve Wozniak as chief scientist, rose Thursday after their debut on the New York Stock Exchange.

Underwritten at $19 per share, Fusion-io's opened at $25 on the New York Stock Exchange. The price, however, quickly fell to around $24 and from there trended downward throughout the trading session, with shares closing at $22.50, up 18 percent for the day.

"Investors are very interested in [initial public offerings] of companies that are connected with the growth of social media," said Kathy Smith, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn.-based company that tracks the IPO market.

Fusion-io's largest customer is Facebook, which accounts for 47 percent of its revenue. Other customers include Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. Overall, the company's 10 largest customers account for 91 percent of its revenue.

Flash memory has no moving parts. It can access data more quickly than the traditional hard drives that rely on spinning disks to hold information.

"One of the biggest barriers we face going forward is people's awareness of what it will mean to live in a world where you don't have to wait for data to be scrapped off a spinning platter — technology that goes back to Thomas Edison and his phonograph," David Flynn, Fusion-io's CEO, said after the debut.

Fusion-io and its shareholders sold $234 million in stock through the company's IPO — $22 million more than it was hoping to raise late last month when it was anticipating selling its shares for $13 to $15 each.

Flynn said the company and its underwriters, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse, decided to raise the offering price of Fusion-io's shares to $19 after they received indications from potential buyers that its stock would be well accepted by the market.

For the recently completed third quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, Fusion-io said revenue surged to $67.3 million, an increase of more than 400 percent over the sales of $13.4 million the company recorded in the same period of its prior fiscal year.

During the third quarter, which ended March 31, Fusion-io also turned profitable, reporting a net income of $7 million, compared with a $6.7 million loss for the same quarter a year ago.

steve@sltrib.com

Twitter: @OberbeckBiz