The company filed paperwork on Friday to increase as much as $ 100 million in its public offering. The placeholder amount may change, depending on the demand from investors.
After many years of investors waiting for the long list of startups with thousands of valuations to come to Wall Street, 2019 formulates to bring a stampede of so-called unicorns. Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest and Postmates are expected to be public this year.
Lyft's public market debut may prove to be a bellwether for how these companies will be received by investors. In particular, Lyft will almost certainly be seen as a proxy for what to expect from its top rival Uber, a much larger company. Like Uber, Lifting is bleeding money. Lift's net loss rose to $ 91[ads1]1 million in 2018 from $ 688 million the year before. Last year, Uber compared $ 1.8 billion last year, according to finance released by the company last month.
In his list of risk factors, Lyft warned that "we have had net losses every year since the start, and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future."
As is often the case when technology companies are public , investors must weigh a story of losing money against the lure of a fast growing business. Lyft posted $ 2.2 billion in revenue in 2018, doubling the year before.
For years, Lyft has been seen as the friendlier alternative to Uber. Launch, launched in 2012 by co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, often marked their cars in the early days with furry pink mustaches. The lift passengers were encouraged to sit in the front and even tie their riders.
On the other hand, Uber was 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 as ballers."
Uber bulldozed ahead of Lift and other rivals through a mix of aggressive fundraising, dirty tricks and a committed attitude to expansion in the US and abroad. The company seemed anything but unstoppable. So in 2017, Uber was aroused by criminal headlines about its workplace culture and by the customer boycotts. It also saw an exodus of leaders, including Kalanick.
While Uber hurt, Lyft increased more money, expanded to dozens of more cities and gained market share against his rival. According to the registration, Lyft's share of the US shipping market increased from 22% at the end of 2016 to 39% in December 2018.
It is now due to beating Uber to the public market.
"We're like cutthroat missionaries," Green CNN Business told in an interview last year. "I think people see the mission question, or see that we care about caring for people, and assume that it means we are soft when it comes to competing."
Green and Logan have a small stake in their own company , but Lyft chooses to use a dual class structure that gives them several votes per share. The effect, according to Lyft's submission, is "to concentrate voting value with our co-founders", potentially at the expense of new shareholders who have an expression of how the company is run.
For all the differences in how their brands are perceived, the two companies must struggle with many of the same problems. As Uber, Lyft faces a long way to profitability and an uncertain regulatory landscape in various markets. As Uber, Lyft also grabs the threat of passengers becoming sexually abused 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 capital investment arm, and in Uber through another venture arm called Google Ventures, later rebranded as GV.
Lyft and Uber have put their services as a means to the higher goal of ending long term car ownership, even as some cities owe it to them to get cramped.
To achieve that goal, Lift and Uber are betting on self-driving cars, electric scooters and bicycles. Uber has gone a step further by investing in flying cars.
There is no guarantee that these high stakes spread out. "The autonomous vehicle industry cannot continue to develop," Raise notes in risk factors, "or that autonomous vehicles may not be accepted by the market, which can adversely affect our potential customers."
