Two years after it first aimed to go public and nine months after it filed confidentially for an initial public offering, computer storage provider Tintri Inc. is finally going to sell shares to public.

The Mountain View, California-based company issued a public filing Thursday to raise $100 million in the IPO. But that’s likely a placeholder until it gauges how much it can raise from investors, since it hasn’t yet decided how many shares will be offered or at what price.

Nine-year-old Tintri makes storage appliances using all flash-memory chips. They’re intended for virtual machines, or computers emulated in software, and software containers, which bundle an application and other software so it can run on multiple computer operating systems as needed. Both are ways to save money and provide more flexible data center setups in the rapidly developing cloud computing era.

Tintri has raised more than $260 million, including a $75 million round in early 2014, a $125 million funding in August 2015 and a secondary round of an undisclosed amount in January.

The company continues to lose big bucks. It lost $106 million on revenue of $125 million in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31. That was slightly higher than its $101 million loss on revenue of $86 million the year before.

What’s more, as Tintri’s S-1 filing concedes, the company faces intensifying competition from both traditional storage companies and younger upstarts. “Some of our competitors have made acquisitions or entered into partnerships or other strategic relationships to offer a more comprehensive solution than they had offered individually,” the filing said.

For one, NetApp Inc. acquired all-flash storage provider SolidFire in early 2016. Then there was Dell Inc.’s massive acquisition of EMC Corp. that closed last September. In February, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. acquired SimpliVity Corp., a developer of so-called hyperconverged systems. And in April, HPE struck again by buying Nimble Storage Inc., another all-flash storage provider, for more than $1 billion.

Tintri’s biggest investors are New Enterprise Associates with a 23 percent stake, Silver Lake Kraftwerk at 20 percent, Insight Venture Partners at 20 percent and Lightspeed Venture Partners at 14.5 percent.

Managing the offering are Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, BofA Merrill Lynch and Pacific Crest Securities. Needham & Co. LLC, Piper Jaffray & Co., Raymond James & Associates Inc. and William Blair & Co. LLC will co-manage. Shares will trade under the ticker symbol TNTR.

Photo: Tintri