Enterprise storage makers Pure Storage, Inc. is looking to sell 25 million shares at a range of $16 to $18 when its initial public offering (IPO) hits the New York Stock Exchange next month, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday.

The price is said to value the company between $2.96 billion and $3.33 billion.

Details of the float were first disclosed in August when the company filed for its IPO complete with not so great financials: while revenue more than quadrupled in the 12 months ending January 31 to $174.5 million, losses more than doubled to $183 million from $78.5 million the previous year, with the company’s sales and marketing expenses nearly tripling during that time.

Pure’s customer portfolio though is on paper solid, with more than 1,100 customers, including Barclays PLC, Xerox Corp. ConocoPhilips and Duke Energy, along with more than 100 of its customers having spent over $1 million on Pure products.

Founded in 2009, Pure is an all-flash enterprise storage company that enables broad deployment of flash in data centers.

The company offers enterprise storage that is claimed to have been designed from the ground up to take full advantage of flash memory, with the products accelerating random I/O-intensive applications like server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, rich analytics/OLAP, SQL, NoSQL) and cloud computing.

The unicorn test

The most notable thing about Pure’s IPO is that it’s literally the first unicorn test: the first startup with a valuation of over $1 billion in its last venture capital round to go public; ultimately it will see whether the insane frenzy of venture capital-led high valuations in the private market reflects the rest of the world on public markets.

Going into the IPO though no one quite knows how the market will take this float either: on one hand Pure has strong growth numbers, but conversely it’s also bleeding money; is the broader market willing to take a same gamble on the company the venture capitalists are?

Add to this the problem that storage IPO’s don’t have a strong track record, as Wikibon’s Paul Gillin explains:

The storage market hasn’t been exactly kind to IPOs recent [sic]. Violin Memory Inc. went public in 2013 and immediately encountered troubles, prompting it to fire its CEO less than three months later. Its stock now trades at 70 percent below its IPO price. Fusion-io, Inc. went through management turmoil following its public offering before being purchased by SanDisk Corp. at only a small premium to its market price.

Prior to the IPO Pure had raised $530.9 million from investors including T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management, Fidelity Ventures, Glynn Capital Management, Greylock Partners, In-Q-Tel, Index Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Redpoint Ventures, Samsung Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and others.

The company plans to use the funds raised from the IPO toward expanding product development and for sales and marketing.

Image via Pure Storage