San Jose — Setting the stage for what could be the largest venture-backed IPO of the year, San Jose-based Nutanix on Monday revealed plans to raise up to $209 million in its upcoming initial public offering.

As the Silicon Valley market starts to recover from an extended tech IPO drought, Nutanix finally is pushing ahead with an offering that has been in the works for nearly a year. The cloud computing company’s decision to take the plunge is a positive sign for the overall market, which saw no Silicon Valley tech IPOs during the first five months of this year.

“The market’s better now,” said Kathleen Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital, which manages IPO-focused exchange-trade funds.

Nutanix is preparing to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market using the symbol NTNX. Smith expects shares to begin trading next week.

Nutanix plans to sell 14 million shares for $11 to $13, with an option for underwriters to buy an additional 2.1 million shares, according to an updated document the company filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Excluding those additional options, Nutanix will raise $168 million if it prices in the middle of the range.

The offering stands to be the largest venture-backed IPO of 2016, Smith said.

Even so, the company is taking a discount as it enters the public market. Nutanix could be worth up to $1.8 billion as a public company if its shares trade at $13 — down from its last reported private valuation of $2 billion.

That’s a common problem among Silicon Valley tech startups today. The public market isn’t willing to match the sky-high valuations that were created as venture capitalists poured money into Nutanix and other private “unicorn” companies, Smith said. That’s why there haven’t been more tech IPOs this year.

“It’s because the valuations were too high,” she said. “The valuations given to these companies back in 2013, 2014 — they weren’t realistic.”

Nutanix originally filed for a $200 million IPO in December, but the IPO market took a nosedive and Nutanix postponed its offering.

Mohit Aron, a Nutanix co-founder who now serves as CEO of Santa Clara-based data storage company Cohesity, guessed that his former company postponed the IPO in part to re-think its strategy as investors started placing a greater premium on profitability.

“My speculation is they spent one year changing those gears and making it more attractive to investors,” Aron said.

Nutanix has yet to make a profit, but its revenue has grown from $127 million in the 2014 fiscal year to $445 million in the fiscal year that ended in July, according to the company’s SEC filing. The company lost almost $169 million in the most recent fiscal year.

Silicon Valley has spawned a few successful IPOs in recent months. Twilio, a San Francisco-based cloud communications startup, saw a first-day pop of nearly 92 percent after it broke the ice in June. And Talend, a Redwood City-based data-software company, jumped 42 percent during its first day of trading in July.