Many of the biggest so-called decacorns, or privately held companies with valuations of at least $10 billion, have filed to go public in the past several months. Among them are Lyft, the ride-hailing company, and Pinterest, the digital pin board. The biggest of them all, Uber, is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in the coming weeks.

But within that cohort of I.P.O. candidates, WeWork stands out for its combination of highflying ambitions and unsettled financial outlook.

It has become one of the biggest corporate landlords in the world, with about 401,000 memberships spread out across 425 locations as of Dec. 31. Nearly two years ago, it bought the longtime Manhattan flagship of Lord & Taylor, the department store chain, to become its own global headquarters.

But it has sought to add more and more services, some of which appear only tenuously related to corporate life. Technically, its parent company is the We Company, whose stated mission is “to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

It bought Meetup, the service for bringing together aficionados of common interests like learning Dutch or knitting, in 2017. It opened a private school in Manhattan. And it invested in a wave-pool company.

That vision has won the company billions of dollars in funding from deep-pocketed investors. Chief among them is SoftBank, which has bet heavily on what it considers world-changing enterprises. Even after it decided not to buy the company, it put $2 billion into the business — bringing its total investment in WeWork to $10.5 billion.

WeWork executives defend their approach, arguing that they are seizing an opportunity.

“We’re looking at building this business out, not just maximizing profitability over the next one to two years,” Michael Gross, the company’s vice chairman, said in an interview last month.