SAN FRANCISCO — Uber expects to be worth as much as $91 billion when it starts selling shares next month, making its initial public offering one of the largest in the history of the technology industry.
With its amended prospectus, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the ride-hailing company is kicking off the last stage of its journey to list on the public stock markets. The offering is expected to mint a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires.
Uber set a price range of $44 to $50 a share, putting its valuation at $80 billion to $91 billion, accounting for stock options and restricted stock. That number could change depending on investor appetite for the shares over the next two weeks.
At that valuation, Uber would dwarf its rival Lyft, which went public last month at a valuation of more than $24 billion — but it would place the company behind Facebook, which went public in 2012 with a market capitalization of $104 billion, and the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, which was valued at $168 billion in its 2014 offering.
Uber said that it planned to sell 180 million shares in the offering, which could raise up to $9 billion.
The company was last appraised at $76 billion in a private fund-raising in August. Its offering price will not be firmed up until the day before it lists its shares.
Uber’s offering is a milestone for “unicorns,” young companies that were privately valued at $1 billion or more. Many of these businesses grew quickly, riding a wave of technology like smartphones, but few have demonstrated they can make money. Uber is deeply unprofitable, as is Lyft.
Such losses have caused jitters on Wall Street: Lyft’s shares now trade below their offering price, for instance. That may have prompted Uber to take a more conservative approach to the stock market.
[Read more: Who’ll get rich when the “unicorns” go public? ]
The filing on Friday confirms that Uber is not expected to make a profit anytime soon. The company said that it lost up to $1.1 billion in the first three months of this year. In the same period a year earlier, Uber had a $3.7 billion profit, which reflected onetime gains, including asset sales.
Using a nonstandard accounting measure that strips out those one-off items as well as costs like stock-based compensation, the company lost as much as $954 million in the quarter, compared with a $280 million loss in the year-ago period.
Revenue rose as much as 20 percent in the quarter from a year ago, to $3.1 billion.
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Uber also announced it had received a new $500 million investment from PayPal, the payments company. That new round of capital will be made at Uber’s I.P.O. price.
The disclosure of the offering’s price range kicks off Uber’s roadshow, a two-week whirlwind of meetings around the country during which its executives will pitch the company’s shares to potential investors.
Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, and others will face questions about the company’s lack of profit, its potential for growth and how it has reformed its workplace culture after a series of scandals in 2017.
How the company plans to make money is likely to be the biggest concern. Ride-hailing is an inherently expensive business, because companies spend heavily on subsidies to attract riders and drivers. Uber is also investing beyond its core ride-hailing business, adding food delivery and freight shipments as well as short-term rentals of electric bikes and scooters.
At the same time, its revenue growth is slowing, and it faces fierce competition from other ride-hailing companies.
Although its ride-hailing business is slowing, Uber is seeing growth in its Uber Eats food delivery unit. It has also formed partnerships with several big foreign rivals and acquired its primary competitor in the Middle East, Careem. And it has secured additional investment for its costly autonomous vehicle unit from SoftBank and Toyota.
Uber has emphasized several financial alternatives to profit to convey to investors that it can make money. One is “core platform contribution margin,” which reflects profit margins from each ride or food delivery, while stripping out the money Uber spends on marketing and other expenses. Uber said its contribution margin fell in the first quarter, to as much as negative 7 percent, amid tough competition in ride-hailing and investment in food delivery.
In a video for the I.P.O., Mr. Khosrowshahi said Uber would eventually make money by growing quickly and becoming the dominant player in the markets where it operates.
“Our strategy is to build the largest network in each market,” he said, adding that Uber believes it has a market share of more than 65 percent in the United States and Canada. The company’s brand and safety record would lead to “a significant margin advantage over time,” he said.
Uber also said it would set aside up to 3 percent of the shares in its offering and make them available for its drivers to purchase at the I.P.O. price. The company’s relationship with drivers is fraught because they are independent contractors and lack benefits and are paid depending on Uber’s pricing of rides. Drivers in eight cities plan to go on strike for 12 hours around Uber’s I.P.O. to call attention to their low wages.
“While investors are doing their due diligence of researching the risk of investing in a company like Uber, they need to be clear about the risk that the dissatisfaction of drivers could cause to the bottom line,” said Rebecca Stack Martinez, an Uber driver who plans to join the strike in San Francisco.
By contrast, the offering will bring more wealth for some of Uber’s biggest investors and founders. The initial pricing values the stake that Travis Kalanick, an Uber co-founder, owns in the company at as much as $5.6 billion. SoftBank’s stake is valued as high as $10.8 billion, and Benchmark, another big Uber investor, has a stake worth $7.2 billion.
The offering is being led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
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