SAN JOSE — Near the close of the best year for initial public offerings since the dot-com boom went bust, Nimble Storage jumped into the welcoming waters and swam away with $168 million.

The six-year-old company announced Thursday evening that its initial batch of shares would be sold for $21 apiece, $1 more than the top of a range that was already increased Wednesday from a maximum of $18. Nimble said it would sell 8 million shares — all from the company, with early investors keeping their stakes — for a total take of $168 million and an initial valuation of $1.48 billion. Shares are expected to begin trading Friday morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NMBL.

Nimble shipped its first data-storage product just more than three years ago, but has found strong demand for enterprise flash storage, with revenues increasing 700 percent in 2011 and 280 percent the past two fiscal years. The flash-storage industry has been a favorite of investors, as well: Sunnyvale enterprise storage company NetApp has gained 18 percent so far this year, Milpitas-based consumer-storage company Sandisk’s market capitalization has increased by more than 50 percent in 2013, and Mountain View startup Pure Storage announced a massive $150 million funding round in August.

Not all storage companies are created equal, however: Violin Memory raised a similar amount to Nimble at a valuation of $900 million in a September IPO, but the price has cratered since. After dropping another 16.9 percent to $2.56 Thursday, the Mountain View company has lost more than 70 percent of its valuation since going public.

Violin’s experience runs counter to the hot market for IPO in 2013. For instance, two other Silicon Valley companies went public the same week as Violin: San Mateo cloud phone systems company RingCentral priced shares at $13 and has yet to trade on Wall Street for less than $15.75, closing Thursday at $17.29; and San Francisco cleantech firm Pattern Energy has remained above its $22 IPO price so far and closed Thursday at $27.47.

In total, 218 companies have made their debuts on Wall Street in 2013, the largest number since 2000, when the Internet boom in Silicon Valley fell apart, according to Renaissance Capital. Nimble was preceded in its debut Thursday by hotelier Hilton, which surpassed San Francisco’s Twitter with a total take of $2.35 billion; concessions company Aramark, which took in $725 million; and Burlingame pet-medicine company Kindred Biosciences, which raised $53 million and saw its shares gain 60.9 percent in its first day of trading.

Nimble has received nearly $100 million in venture funding, led by investments from Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, which will each own 18.4 percent of the company after the IPO, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which will own 13.9 percent.

Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510.