Uber headquarters Uber headquarters, located at 1455 Market St. in San Francisco. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

After much anticipation, Uber Technologies Inc. dropped its filing for an initial public offering Thursday, stating that it plans to raise about $1 billion.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing giant's IPO is being driven by Cooley, with Covington & Burling acting as special counsel on certain undisclosed matters, according to Uber's S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Underwriters are represented by Davis Polk & Wardwell.

The filing did not disclose the legal fees and expenses the firms are collecting from the deal. However, it reveals that attorneys at Cooley have a beneficial interest in an aggregate of less than 0.03 percent of Uber's common stock.

Leading Uber's IPO are Cooley partners David Peinsipp, co-head of the firm's global capital markets practice group, Siana Lowrey and Andrew Williamson. Peinsipp also worked on Snap Inc.'s 2017 IPO launch.

Other Cooley lawyers working on the deal include compensation and benefits partner Barbara Mirza, and capital markets partners Charlie Kim and Kristin VanderPas. Kim co-chairs the firm's capital markets practice group.

Cooley has had a long-standing relationship with Uber, the firm said, advising the company on a series of private financing, strategic and other matters since 2013. The firm represented Uber in negotiating an $8 billion investment from a consortium of investors led by SoftBank, and advised Uber on its $3.4 billion deal with Yandex to create a ride-hailing business in Russia and the surrounding region.

Cooley's lawyers also worked with Uber on its $680 million acquisition of Otto, the self-driving truck startup founded by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo.

The group working with Uber from Washington, D.C.-based Covington & Burling is led by corporate partners Eric Blanchard, Kerry Burke and Brian Rosenzweig. The team from Davis Polk & Wardwell is led by corporate partners Alan Denenberg and Sarah Solum, according to Uber's filing, along with associates Emily Roberts, Tierney O'Rourke and Dan Fox.

Uber's SEC paperwork revealed it plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in early May under the stock ticker “UBER.” 

Uber was last valued in the private markets at about $76 billion when Toyota Motor Corp. invested in 2018. At a recent private valuation by the investment bankers, Uber was valued as high as $120 billion in the public markets.

In Uber's filing, the ride hailing company disclosed that it has brought in $11.3 billion in revenue last year, a 42 percent increase from $7.9 billion in 2017. Uber posted net income of $997 million in 2018, but an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.85 billion.

Uber said it had 91 million monthly users in the fourth quarter of 2018, which was up 34 percent from a year earlier.

With Uber joining the fray, 2019 is shaping up to be a big year for tech IPOs, and a busy period for the law firms advising those companies as they go public.

Lyft, a rival to Uber that made its IPO last month, has said in filings that it will pay $1.4 million in legal fees and expenses to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and underwriter counsel Goodwin Procter.

The digital pin board Pinterest reported in a recent filing that its IPO generated $2 million in legal fees for Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Potter Anderson & Corroon, and underwriter counsel Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

PagerDuty Inc., which makes tools for software developers, made its NYSE debut Thursday at $36.75 a share. PagerDuty's IPO was represented by Cooley and underwriter counsel Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, which will share $1.5 million legal fees and expenses, according to the company's S-1 filling.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the amount that Uber said it plans to raise in its IPO.

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