Lyft just passed Uber in the race to go public.
The company filed paperwork on Friday to raise as much as $100 million in its public offering. The amount could change, depending on investor demand.
It will list on the Nasdaq under the stock ticker “LYFT.”
After years of investors waiting for the long list of startups with billion-dollar valuations to come to Wall Street, 2019 is shaping up to bring a stampede of so-called unicorns. Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest and Postmates are all expected to go public this year.
Lyft’s public market debut could prove to be a bellwether for how these companies will be received by investors. In particular, Lyft will almost certainly be viewed as a proxy for what to expect from its chief rival Uber, a much larger business. Like Uber, Lyft is bleeding money. Lyft’s net loss climbed to $911 million in 2018 from $688 million a year earlier. Uber, by comparison, lost $1.8 billion last year, according to financials released by the company last month.
In its list of risk factors, Lyft warned that “we have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.”
As is often the case with tech companies going public, investors will have to weigh a history of losing money against the allure of a fast-growing business. Lyft hit $2.2 billion in revenue in 2018, double the previous year.
For years, Lyft has been viewed as the friendlier alternative to Uber. Lyft, which was launched in 2012 by co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, often marked its cars in the early days with furry pink mustaches. Lyft passengers were encouraged to sit in the front and even fist bump their drivers.
Uber, on the other hand, launched in 2009 as a black car service. As that company’s former CEO Travis Kalanick once proudly stated, Uber’s original premise was to let him and his friends “roll around San Francisco like ballers.”
Uber bulldozed ahead of Lyft and other rivals through a mix of aggressive fundraising, dirty tricks and a take-no-prisoners attitude toward expansion in the US and abroad. The company seemed all but unstoppable. Then in 2017, Uber was upended by damning headlines about its workplace culture and by customer boycotts. It also saw an exodus of executives, including Kalanick.
