Lyft, the ride-hailing 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 high-flying startups with billion-dollar valuations to land on 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 bellweather 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 that is widely reported to be seeking a valuation of $120 billion in its IPO.
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 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 customer boycotts. It also suffered an executive exodus, including Kalanick.
While Uber did damge control, Lyft raised more money, expanded to dozens more cities and gained market share against its rival. And now it's on the cusp of beating Uber to the public market.
"We're like cutthroat missionaries," Green told CNN Business in an interview last year. "I think people see the missionary aspect, or see that we care about taking care of people, and assume it means we'll be soft when it comes to competing."
For all the differences in how their brands are perceived, the two companies must contend with many of the same problems. Like Uber, Lyft faces a long road to profitability and an uncertain regulatory landscape in various markets. Like Uber, Lyft also grapples with the threat of passengers being sexually assaulted by drivers.
If that's not enough, both companies also have overlapping private investors, including Fidelity and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The latter invested in Lyft through CapitalG, its growth equity investment arm, and in Uber through a different venture arm called Google Ventures, later rebranded as GV.
Lyft and Uber have pitched their services as a means towards the loftier goal of ending car ownership in the long-term, even as some cities blame them for making congestion worse.
To achieve that goal, Lyft and Uber are investing in self-driving cars and electric scooters. Uber has gone a step further by investing in flying cars.
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