Uber Confirms New $1.2B Funding Round, Looks to Asia for Expansion

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/04/uber-confirms-new-1-2b-funding-round-looks-to-asia-for-expansion/

by chuhnk • 12 years ago

80 88 12 years ago

applecore2• 12 years ago

It's a popular meme in tech journalism that Uber is "under attack" for its nefarious business practices, but how much has this sense pervaded outside the tech bubble?

jonathanjaeger• 12 years ago

On Facebook I've seen people post about it. These are people who might have a job in tech (e.g. marketing at a tech company) but for the most part don't read Hacker News or tech articles often. Keep in mind there were some late night television shows covering the issue and a few politicians peaking in for review. I think it is an issue with some appeal to those outside of tech, but for the most it doesn't seem to be an issue. I mean NSA spying and privacy issues don't get the masses to delete Facebook accounts or Gmail, so it certainly won't stop Uber.

smackfu• 12 years ago

Outside the tech bubble and the big cities, the viewpoint is generally "What's Uber?" and "What's AirBnb?" I even have had Uber drivers in big cities who had no idea what AirBnb was.

ryanhuff3• 12 years ago

Its bubbled up to the New York Times. Otherwise, if fails my "mom test", so its still a niche service IMO.

smeyer2• 12 years ago

What's your "mom test"? My (mid-60s) mother uses Uber, as do some of my middle-aged friends, even if it's far less popular there than it is among my friends in their 20s.

pbreit11• 12 years ago

A trillion dollar niche!

freehunter• 12 years ago

My wife (mid-20s) and her friends were going to take one for the first time after I told them about it as they were headed to Chicago for the weekend. They all got scared and took a cab instead because they had never heard of Uber and didn't trust it. Nothing I could say would convince them otherwise, they need to hear about it from other sources to think it's legit.

People just don't know about Uber. They're not recognizable enough (no advertising).

berberous• 12 years ago

How much does Uber spend? How could they possibly need to raise that much?

jld• 12 years ago

Uber spends a lot to acquire new drivers. They hire staff to recruit them, give them a new phone, and give the driver a signing bonus.

erichurkman• 12 years ago

The drivers pay for the phones now, by the way, at $10/week deducted automatically from their fares. They also recently released the driver app for iOS and Android for personal phones, too, so they (and the drivers) can forgo some of that cost.

They've also changed their take rate on drivers. New drivers IIRC are at 25%, older partners are at 20%, but maybe this varies on city.

austenallred• 12 years ago

Wow. $40 Billion valuation, hiring 1 million people in the coming year, opening new sites at the rate of almost 1/day.

Neither Travis Kalanick or any current senior execs sold any stock in the current round.

Uber will either be the biggest boom or bust story there's been in quite some time. This will be fun to watch.

toomuchtodo3• 12 years ago

Have any of the released Uber decks show when profitability is expected and what their run rate is? Curious how long VC money can fund cheap rides for.

dr_• 12 years ago

The rides are not really cheap. At best, in nyc, uber x is advertised to be cheaper than a taxi but that is really not always the case.

prostoalex2• 12 years ago

The cheap rides are passed on to the drivers, which some of them are not too happy about http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/09/02/uber-defends-slash..., Uber still takes a cut off the transaction.

pbreit11• 12 years ago

It could easily be profitable tomorrow if it scaled back growth. Gross revenue run rate is around $10b and net revenue $2b. And growing very rapidly. Riders pay for their rides so I have no idea what your VC reference means.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Under the same leadership?

soneca• 12 years ago

Honest question: what is the return multiple that an investor expect when he/she invests in a $40bi valuation?

If Angels & Seed expect 100x; VC expect 10x; I imagine these investors expect as much as a common stock exchange investor: 1.2x a year?

JonFish85• 12 years ago

My guess would be a $100b market-cap IPO in the next 12-18 months is what they're hoping for. Long enough to grow more, but quickly enough to get out before the regulatory hammer starts to fall.

jliwjoi3wqd• 12 years ago

Hey look, the cancer is spreading.

Though, I'm sure that the people here will justify Uber's merely superficial bad behavior. After all, silicon valley can do no evil, and accumulating profit at all costs is the best way to advance human society, right? Stay classy HN.

SyncTheory13• 12 years ago

I will never use an Uber car due to the activities they have been caught participating in. Everybody around me knows that I have intense dislike for them and recommend Lyft instead.

However, I feel like your comment is unfair in attacking HN - Most of what I've read against Uber has come from this site.

Either way, I was very disappointed to see today's news.

venomsnake• 12 years ago

That's almost 3 whatsapps.

Congratulations to the team. Although lately I feel like Dr. Evil and his 1 million ransom when I see that kind of valuations thrown around.

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

Well, not exactly. Whatsapp has been sold for $19B, this is a _valuation_ of $40B. I think selling something for $19B is bigger than being valued at $40B and getting $1.2B in funding.

Huge numbers though, I can't realistically appreciate these amounts.

pbreit11• 12 years ago

With $2b in revenues vs ~$0, I'd put the Uber valuation in the bigger category.

untog4• 12 years ago

Investment rounds like this worry me - Uber is already doing fine, and making money. An injection of cash like this will help them expand to new markets (fine) and also absolutely flatten competition in existing markets (bad).

They could drop the price of Uber X (again) but absorb the cost to drivers, edging Lyft out of the market. As long as they beat Lyft before the investment cash runs out, they win the market and are free to raise prices again. I don't want Uber to become the new taxi monopoly off the back of VC cash.

jcampbell1• 12 years ago

This business is a natural monopoly, which is exactly what the VCs understand. There won't be competition, because whoever has the most customers can offer the best prices to customers, and the most earnings to drivers. The winner can suffocate the competition.

It's basic game theory, if I run an operation that does 10,000 rides a day, and my competitor does 5000 rides per day, I can tweak prices and wait times such that the competing service is strictly inferior for both drivers and passengers.

prostoalex2• 12 years ago

On-demand business maybe. But pre-arranged car service business (where majority of transactions is airport pick-ups/drop-offs) is very fragmented, and Uber is just another player there.

If you don't need on-demand availability, Blacklane.com or Limos.com are consistently cheaper than Uber Black.

And if you are okay with waiting for maybe an hour or so, Sidecar is usually a better deal for longer distances.

jhonovich2• 12 years ago

Presuming you can block your drivers from working for rival services simultaneuosly.

icebraining4• 12 years ago

By that logic, all businesses with economies of scale are "natural monopolies". That's nonsense, because it assumes that everything else (particularly income per ride and cost per ride) are the same, or at least that they can be the same at a whim.

And in practice, we see smaller companies competing successfully with larger ones all the time.

free2rhyme214• 12 years ago

It must be hard for Travis to manage all this growth. I always wondered what the next Google was and I never expected it would be a taxi ride sharing company.

nostrademons• 12 years ago

Uber seems a lot more like the next Netscape. Super-fast growth, media darling, natural monopoly, took lots of capital, ultra-hyped valuation, arrogant, and threatening to a lot of powerful people.

Google, if you remember its growth period, basically came out of nowhere. It was beloved by users and adoption grew rapidly, but they didn't start getting serious publicity (nor did they seek it) until around 2004. They, AFAICT, took only one round of funding, $25M in 2000, before attaining profitability sometime in 2002. And they worked very hard to seem non-threatening until they were big enough to actually be a threat: remember "we do only one thing and one thing well - Search", "Don't be evil", their cordial relationship with Apple, the explicit decision not to challenge Microsoft, and how they only took advantage of companies that were going out of business anyway?

applecore2• 12 years ago

It's crazy to think a certain venture capital firm could have invested around $50 million in late 2011 for just over 12% of the company—a stake that'd be valued at around $5 billion now—but quibbling over the valuation killed the deal.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/12/uber-travis-kalan...

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

Umbrellas at the ready, the mess is going to be big when this bubble eventually bursts. Sure, I see the value of services like Uber, but there are so many ridesharing services in the market offering a decent product, Lyft arguably has a better app. While I don't doubt its usefulness, I don't think Uber is worth $40b. Especially considering it was only valued at roughly $17b in the summer which was what, like 6 months ago? A $23b jump in value in six months, seems kind of unrealistic to me, but that's how it works in tech.

I don't want to see Uber fail, because I hate catching taxis, but I think there needs to be a serious reality check here. The business model that Uber runs upon is still relatively unregulated & fragile, and as shown in Vancouver, cities and Governments have the power to easily drive out services like Uber. Not to mention the pressure from taxi lobbyists.

I don't want to see Uber become a monopoly, but this cash injection can only mean that Uber will aggressively attempt to drive out its competitors therefore becoming a monopoly and in the process, a splitting image of the broken taxi industry they are trying to disrupt. As history has shown, when you have next to no competition, you stop innovating. Lets just see how this plays out.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

If I may make the counter argument here, nobody except perhaps the odds makers in the bay area, are going to note or care if Sequoia Ventures loses all of its investment in Uber, or if Menlo does, or if KP does. It will show up on CNBC as "Well its been a bad year for Venture Capital firms, probably not going to host lavish parties..." but for most people who don't work at a company that goes 'poof' because it ran out of money and couldn't raise more, its really a non issue.

For bubbles to really be bubbles they need broad participation, and VC funding really is limited in how many people can participate.

morganvachon3• 12 years ago

I don't want to see Uber fail, because I hate catching taxis

I want to see Uber in particular fail because of their horrible treatment of drivers, spying on (and publicly shaming the habits of) their riders, threatening journalists over negative press, and because of their shady business practices in general.

I want to see ridesharing as a service succeed, as I think it is the future of taxi service. But I want Uber to either go away completely, or else reorganize as a positive, beneficial company instead of a cancer with douchebags at the helm.

tomp• 12 years ago

Hm... it might be a stupid question, but by "ridesharing service", do you mean Uber, or something else? To me, Uber doesn't seem a ridesharing service, merely a Taxi on demand with a nice phone+GPS app.

toomuchtodo3• 12 years ago

Yes. Uber can fail, but ridesharing/e-hailing/etc needs to succeed against entrenched interests while working towards sensible government regulation.

mliker• 12 years ago

Those are pretty strong words, "a cancer with douchebags at the helm." Any personal experiences that motivated these words other than joining in the hatred hive mind fostered by the media?

pbreit11• 12 years ago

Disagree with almost everything you've written. It's a winner-take-most/all, trillion plus dollar market. Investors getting in at $40b, besides having little downside due to preferences, will almost certainly make a reasonable return. Uber is already on track for $1b in revenue and continues to grow very rapidly. Governments have in fact shown no ability to stop Uber (only a very few instances in the entire world). Peter Thiel would argue (effectively, imo) that monopolies are important in driving innovation.

mcintyre1994• 12 years ago

I can't think of anything that would stop governments destroying Uber - is there anything? They've already started getting banned in various places, and it's not hard to write laws to enforce a taxi monopoly.

They're doing well but I don't see anything that would stop government regulating them out of existence. They're no, say, Bitcoin in that regard for sure.

tzs• 12 years ago

Governments have in fact shown no ability to stop Uber

Governments have not seriously tried to stop Uber yet. If/when they do, they will easily succeed.

Right now, the farthest most have gone is fining drivers a relatively small amount, which Uber pays. What happens when they step that up to seizing the car? Who is going to sign up to be an Uber driver in a city where it can get your car seized?

Here's how I predict it will go down. Cities will eventually decide to legalize Uber-type services, with such companies required to obtain a license. There will be a limited number of companies licensed in each city--it makes much more sense for the city and its citizens to have a small number of healthy companies than to have a large number of companies barely scraping by. Those licenses will go to Lyft and other non-Uber services, because they have not had the "fuck you" attitude that Uber has.

That's when the cities will crack down severely on Uber.

mbesto2• 12 years ago

Uber is already on track for $1b in revenue*

*gross revenue. Big difference.

encoderer• 12 years ago

I think you're worrying far too much about valuations at various rounds. Personally, I have no idea if Uber is worth $40bn. It just doesn't matter. When Uber IPOs, what "pop" do you expect if their market cap is $20bn instead of $40?

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

The more interesting bit for me is that a lot of smaller players are also getting traction (GrabTaxi, Lyft, etc) so what that says to me is that folks have decided that this will be the new way rides are done and are trying to get in on that shift. It seems that a lot of the existing cab companies are private so there isn't an easy way to short their stock to double down on the bet.

kunle• 12 years ago

The power of product market fit.

bhewes• 12 years ago

Ah, I have thought of Uber as UPS for people. Door to door routing, with out me having to think of all the logistics would be a thing of beauty.

Rainymood• 12 years ago

Scaling done right. It's kind of awesome seeing such a company blow up like this.

I think that a lot more competitors in the near future will enter the market (as Uber pretty much validated the market for them) but Uber will remain the biggest and baddest. Uber will probably become very big, then diversify in some way (just like Google did) and then Uber will be established. Maybe 'Ubering' will even become a word just like 'googling'... heh, funny. But hey, it's all speculation from this point imo.

Time will tell.

big_astrocyte3• 12 years ago

This figure might be wrong but the entire US taxi industry makes a revenue of $11 billion per year. Since US forms about 20% of the world's economy, we can assume the global taxi revenue to be $50 billion. Even if Uber takes in 20% from every ride, I can't imagine them possibly having more than $10 billion in revenue. Assuming Uber forms a 60% monopoly, they won't be making more than $6 billion in revenue. Kindly correct me if I'm completely off here.

One way for Uber to overcome this is to bet on the growth of the taxi industry in Asia. But, even in Asia, governments are pouring in massive investments into public infrastructure. When I visit New Delhi, I rarely end up in a cab because the public infrastructure isn't all that bad. Public transportation projects are coming up in even the smallest of Asian cities. If things go well, people won't need an Uber for most occasions because you'll have to wait 5 minutes for a bus/tube/{new disrupter}!

This is what might happen. Uber is going to have a massive IPO with a highly overvalued P/E (this is what the VCs are betting on). Then, after a few years, the market will realize that this world is finite, unlike their greed (have twitter's investors started realizing that?). What happens next is that everyone looses.

Uber deserves credit, just not this much!! There are other big problems the world must focus on. The short nearsightedness of humans is the biggest obstacle to our own growth.

raldi2• 12 years ago

How big would the ridesharing market be if it became cheaper than car ownership?

big_astrocyte3• 12 years ago

We already have a ridesharing system which is much cheaper than car ownership and that system is called Public transport. I'm not entirely sure how Uber could turn into a system cheaper than London's tube or Delhi's metro. Plus, these systems are raising far bigger rounds than the $1.2 billion Uber just raised.

Was Uber designed to be the cheapest form of transport? I doubt it. You have pure convenience on one end (car ownership) and pure cost saving on the other (public transport) on the other. The taxi system lies in the middle, so does Uber. Taxis will have a space in the transportation market, just not the biggest space. I might be wrong here!!

Synroc• 12 years ago

I think Uber in this case managed to capture a large demographic of people who do not take taxis, but who are willing to pay for Uber, hence the market for Uber in the US is that of $11 billion/year + X billion/year of people who fall in that category.

Consider the fact that just last year, Uber had more than $10 billion in transaction (keeping 20% of that as revenue)

NTDF9• 12 years ago

Surge pricing for investors?

billconan• 12 years ago

good luck in China where carpooling was considered as illegal.

nwjose• 12 years ago

Numbers like these (also for Whatsapp) only show that the US$ is way overrated and a massive crash is probably due in a couple years.

ingenieros• 12 years ago

Didn't PG say that mean people fail?

Uber Confirms New $1.2B Funding Round, Looks to Asia for Expansion

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