Snap Aims for Valuation of More Than $20 Billion in I.P.O.

SAN FRANCISCO The parent company of Snapchat is poised to hold one of the biggest initial public offerings in years, but while its market debut is eagerly awaited, the start-up has so far tempered expectations for the size of the stock sale.

The company, Snap Inc., disclosed on Thursday that it expected to be valued at as much as $22.2 billion in the sale. At the midpoint of the offerings range of $14 to $16 per share, Snap would be worth nearly $20.9 billion.

Even at the top of that range, Snap would end up with a valuation on the lower end of the $20 billion to $25 billion mark that it had anticipated months ago. Either way, it is still up from the approximately $16.5 billion the company valued itself late last year.

The final pricing of the new shares and the companys valuation could still change. The share price will be not be set until after Snap embarks on a nearly two-week tour of investors that will take its executives across the country. The company is expected to begin trading around March 2 on the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker symbol SNAP.

Even if the value were to drop, it would still be one of the biggest technology offerings of the decade. At this stage of the offering process, Twitter was valued at more than $12 billion, including options and restricted stock units, in October 2013. A year earlier, Facebook was valued at $86 billion at a similar stage.

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Three of Snaps top executives the co-founder and chief executive Evan Spiegel, the chief strategy officer Imran Khan and the chief financial officer Andrew Vollero will make the tour along with underwriters to pitch investors on what remains the most highly anticipated I.P.O. so far this year.

The road show, as the process is known, formally began on Thursday as the three men visited several of the underwriters. Morgan Stanley, the lead bank, hosted the executives at its Midtown Manhattan headquarters to speak with its sales force in a standing-room-only meeting.

Morgan Stanley also plastered Snaps name in its familiar bright yellow on the electronic zipper outside its building.

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And Goldman Sachs installed a vending machine that sells Snaps Spectacles sunglasses with an integrated camera that can upload videos to Snapchat in the mezzanine lobby of its downtown Manhattan headquarters.

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The message that Snap is selling is relatively simple. The company has quickly become one of the technology worlds brightest stars, and its offering stands out in a largely barren landscape for new stocks.

But potential investors are liable to question whether Snap can maintain its enviable user growth rate, particularly as Facebook has unabashedly copied many of the services top features within Instagram.

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Snaps executives will most likely emphasize how highly the services users are engaged with the app, which as of last year averaged about 158 million users each day. Unlike other social media companies, Snap has been clear in prioritizing North America and Europe over more global ambitions, at least for now.

Prospective investors may also question how long Snap will take to post a profit. The company has disclosed that it lost $514 million last year, up from $373 million in 2015. But its revenue grew by about seven times over that same span, to $404.5 million last year from $58.7 million in 2015.

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Investors who buy into Snap will have little say in the companys strategic direction, however. Even after the I.P.O., Mr. Spiegel and a fellow co-founder, Robert Murphy, are expected to retain nearly 89 percent of the voting shares because the shares to be sold in the offering will hold no voting rights.

From its beginning in a Stanford dorm room six years ago, Snapchat has grown from a trendy redoubt for millennials into a top destination for both users and advertisers. It started life as a way for people to send self-destructing photo messages to friends, but it has since added more ambitious tools that let users compile stories about their days and special filters that let users transform their faces into dogs, fairies or paid-for content like Taco Bell tacos.

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Snap is expected to produce huge wealth at least on paper for its existing investors, notably Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy, who each own 227 million shares. At the midpoint of Thursdays price range, their holdings would be worth about $3.4 billion each.

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