WeWork Cos. has a plan to shore up confidence in its business before it goes public: offer billions of dollars in debt that would fund its growth until it can turn a profit.

The money-losing office-space manager is seeking to raise as much as $3 billion to $4 billion in coming months through a debt facility that could grow as big as $10 billion over the next several years, the people said. This debt offering would be independent of the money WeWork raises in its initial public offering and could even raise more money for the company than the IPO itself.

The huge capital raise even before the IPO reflects the skepticism surrounding well-known companies like Lyft Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. that have racked up steep losses and gone public with much fanfare but without much trading success. Both Lyft’s and Uber’s stock prices are below where they went public—and even further below lofty pre-IPO expectations of how high they could trade.

WeWork, which lost $1.9 billion last year, has been dogged by comparisons to Uber and Lyft and haunted by a huge planned investment from SoftBank Group Corp. that fell apart after some key investors balked at the plan. The cash from this debt facility could help shore up demand for the IPO, people familiar with the planned deal said, in part by showing the company will be able to fund growth for years without having to turn again to equity markets.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are structuring and backing the deal, potentially along with other banks, the people said. WeWork Chief Executive Adam Neumann met in recent weeks with the banks’ CEOs, Jamie Dimon and David Solomon, to discuss this deal and the company’s IPO, people familiar with these discussions said.

WeWork’s primary business is to rent long-term spaces, renovate them, then divide the offices and sublease them on a short-term basis to other firms. The company owns few properties itself. Through this debt offering, WeWork would use the cash flows it generates from individual buildings to fund the interest payments on the debt, the people said.