Last month, Instacart revealed in an offering prospectus that the ads and software sales had allowed it to do what skeptics considered impossible — turn a profit. Other so-called gig economy companies that use contract workers to deliver goods via apps have typically failed to do so.

Nearly a third of Instacart’s $2.5 billion in revenue last year came from its “highly profitable” ads and software division, according to its prospectus. In the first half of this year, Instacart’s $406 million in revenue from ads and software helped propel it to $242 million in profit.

Instacart shows that one way for a historically unprofitable gig business to get to the public markets is to diversify into more lucrative areas and move away from its gig-economy roots. It has been a long road for the start-up, which weathered years of losing money and the 2021 resignation of its co-founder and former chief executive, Apoorva Mehta, after friction with the board.

Still, Instacart’s profits may not be enough to attract investors to its I.P.O. Once worth $39 billion in the private markets, the company has slashed its valuation several times, most recently to $10 billion. In a filing this week, it set a price range of $26 to $28 a share, valuing it at $8.9 billion at the midpoint. Instacart plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange, days after the public offering of Arm, the British chip designer.

In an interview last year, Ms. Simo, who is now 37, said she was overseeing a “third act of the company” — after first attracting consumers and then attracting grocers — which included the software tools for retailers. She said her goal was for Instacart to compete more with Amazon, which offers grocery delivery services, and to help grocery stores adapt to the digital world.