Pure Storage Files to Go Public Later This Year

Pure Storage, the company challenging established players in the enterprise storage business by using flash memory chips instead of hard drives, has filed for an initial public offering.

The company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t specify how many shares the company will sell, so its valuation isn’t yet clear. It says it hopes to raise as much as $300 million in the offering, but that amount will likely change.

Its most recent funding round was for $225 million and valued the firm at more than $3 billion. Investment firm T. Rowe Price and the private equity firm Tiger Global led that round. Pure has raised more than $470 million in total.

Morgan Stanley is leading the offering along with Goldman Sachs. Barclays, Allen & Company and BofA Merrill Lynch will act as book-running managers, with Pacific Crest Securities, KeyBanc Capital Markets, Raymond James and Evercore ISI as co-managers. Pure named Tim Riitters, a former finance exec at Google, as its CFO last August.

Pure hasn’t yet selected which exchange it will trade on, but it will trade under the ticker symbol PSTG.

The company reported revenue of $174.5 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31 and a net loss in that period of $183.2 million. That would amount to a per-share loss of $6.56, the filing shows. In its most recent quarter, ended April 30, it posted a $49 million loss on revenue of $74 million. Revenue increased year-on-year in that quarter by more than 200 percent.

The biggest shareholder is Sutter Hill Ventures, which led its $5 million A round back in 2009 and has nearly 44 million shares accounting for about 28 percent of the company. Sutter Hill managing director Mike Speiser sits on Pure’s board.

Aneel Bhusri, the CEO of Workday and longtime partner at VC firm Greylock Partners, also sits on the Pure board. Greylock led Pure’s $20 million B round and has nearly 27.7 million shares or about 17 percent of the company. Redpoint Ventures has about nine million shares. Index Ventures has about four million shares and its partner Mike Volpi has a seat on the board.

CTO and co-founder John Colgrove has 13.6 million shares, CEO Scott Dietzen has 7.3 million shares and Frank Slootman, the CEO of ServiceNow who also sits on the board, has a little less than a half million shares.

The filing ends speculation around one of the more closely watched IPO-bound companies in Silicon Valley.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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