Flash sales company Zulily hired investment banks as advisors for a possible inital public offering, according to sources with knowledge on the matter.

The successful e-commerce company sought Citigroup's investment arm, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in recent weeks for the IPO plans, one of the people added.

Zulily's IPO plan surfaced months after the company earned US $85 million in a deal led by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, that valued it around US$ 1 billion.

"We are impressed with Zulily's strategic positioning," Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan noted in a November blog regarding the firm's investment on Zulily.

"One reality in e-commerce today is that you want to avoid trying to compete directly with Amazon, who is hyper-aggressive in leveraging their enormous scale and cost advantage to offer the largest selection and lowest prices on the Internet," the former eBay executive added. "Zulily does this by aggregating a long tail of talented designers who typically lack extensive national distribution."

Zulily is among the first of the new lineup of e-commerce start-ups to attempt to go public, along with rival companies Etsy, Gilt and Wayfair.

The "flash sales" company was founded by Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens, former Blue Nile executives, in 2009 and has more than 10 million members to date.