• It has a 39 percent share of the United States ride-sharing market, based on estimates by the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, which is an investor in Lyft. That is up from 22 percent in 2016. But Lyft has been offering discounts to riders ahead of its offering, and the company warned: “We believe that much of the growth in our rider base and the number of drivers on our platform is attributable to our paid marketing initiatives.”

• Lyft only operates in the U.S. and Canada, unlike Uber, which has operations across the globe.

• But it has matched its rival’s innovation, by developing self-driving car technology and expanding into short-term bike and scooter rentals.

Its plan for the offering

Lyft will list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker of, er, “LYFT.”

The company expects to be valued at as much as $23 billion. It plans to sell about 35.4 million shares, including the additional shares allotted to the underwriters, at between $62 to $68 a piece. At the high-end of that range, it will raise $2.4 billion.

That’s well above the $15.1 billion that private investors valued it at during a financing round in June.

And it would make it one of the largest I.P.O.s in the past 10 years. At a $23 billion valuation, Lyft’s offering would rank as the fifth largest since the financial crisis, and among the largest ever for American technology start-ups — only Facebook’s I.P.O. in 2012 would be larger.