Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 15,000 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 180 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It coordinates an average of 36 million trips and delivery orders per day, and has coordinated 64 billion trips and delivery orders since its inception in 2010. In the second quarter of 2025, the company had a take rate of 30.6% for mobility services and 18.8% for food delivery.
The company is also in the process of developing robotaxi services in partnership with Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Baidu.
History
In 2009, Garrett Camp, a co-founder of StumbleUpon, came up with the idea to create Uber to make it easier and cheaper to procure direct transportation. Camp and Travis Kalanick had spent $800 hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve, which they deemed excessive, and Camp was also inspired by his difficulty in finding a taxi on a snowy night in Paris. The prototype of the mobile app was built by Camp and his friends, Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with Kalanick as the "mega advisor" to the company.In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee; he was named chief executive officer in May 2010. In December 2010, Kalanick succeeded Graves as CEO and Graves became the chief operating officer.
Following a beta launch in May 2010, Uber's services and mobile app launched publicly in San Francisco in 2011. Originally, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi. In 2011, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber after complaints from San Francisco taxicab operators. Kalanick believed that in addition to efficiency, Uber offered elegance because all drivers had fancy black cars. He did not feel that regular cars driven by non-professional drivers would be attractive. Kalanick and his angel investor Jason Calacanis publicly stated in podcasts that the world's first rideshare company was illegal and would not work.
The company's early hires included a nuclear physicist, a computational neuroscientist, and a machinery expert who worked on predicting arrival times for Uber's cars more accurately than Google APIs. In April 2012, Uber launched a service in Chicago, whereby users were able to request a regular taxi or an Uber driver via its mobile app.
In July 2012, Uber introduced UberX, a cheaper option that allowed drivers to use non-luxury vehicles, but still subject to having commercial licenses.
On April 1, 2013, after Wingz obtained the first legal rideshare license in the world, followed by Lyft and Sidecar, Uber announced in a white paper penned by Travis Kalanick that Uber was going to copy this model and add regular drivers with personal vehicles to the UberX platform instead of only commercially-licensed vehicles, subject to a background check, insurance, registration, and vehicle standards. By December 2013, the service operated in 65 cities.
In December 2013, USA Today named Uber its tech company of the year.
In August 2014, Uber launched a shared transport service in the San Francisco Bay Area and launched Uber Eats, a food delivery service.
While it was expanding, Uber generally commenced operations in a city without regard for local regulations. If faced with regulatory opposition, Uber called for public support for its service and mounted a political campaign, supported by lobbying, to change regulations. Uber argued that it is "a technology company" and not a taxi company, and therefore it was not subject to regulations affecting taxi companies. Uber's strategy was generally to "seek forgiveness rather than permission". In 2014, with regards to airport pickups without a permit in California, drivers were actually told to ignore local regulations and that the company would pay for any citations.
In August 2016, facing tough competition, Uber sold its operations in China to DiDi in exchange for an 18% stake in DiDi. DiDi agreed to invest $1 billion in Uber. Uber had started operations in China in 2014, under the name 优步.
In 2016, Uber acquired Ottomotto, a self-driving truck company founded by Anthony Levandowski, for $625 million. Levandowski, previously employed by Waymo, allegedly founded Ottomotto using trade secrets he stole from Waymo. Uber settled a lawsuit regarding the use of such intellectual property and reached a deal to use Waymo's technology for its freight transport operations.
In December 2016, Uber acquired Geometric Intelligence and its 15-person staff, which became "Uber AI", a division for researching artificial intelligence and machine learning. Uber AI was shut down in May 2020.
In August 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi, the former CEO of Expedia Group, replaced Kalanick as CEO. Earlier in March 2015, as CEO of Expedia Group, Khosrowshahi had led a multimillion equity investment in Wingz, Inc., the first ridesharing company in the world.
In July 2017, Uber received a five-star privacy rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but was harshly criticized by the group in September 2017 for a controversial policy of tracking customers' locations even after a ride ended, forcing the company to reverse its policy.
In February 2018, Uber combined its operations in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan with those of Yandex Taxi and invested $225 million in the venture. In March 2018, Uber merged its services in Southeast Asia with those of Grab in exchange for a 27.5% ownership stake in Grab.
Between May 2018 and November 2018, Uber offered Uber Rent powered by Getaround, a peer-to-peer carsharing service available to some users in San Francisco.
In November 2018, Uber became a gold member of the Linux Foundation.
In 2018, Uber formed a partnership with Autzu, a San Francisco-based ridesharing company. This collaboration provides Uber drivers with the opportunity to rent electric Tesla on an hourly basis.
On May 10, 2019, Uber became a public company via an initial public offering.
In March and May 2019, the 2019 Lyft and Uber drivers' strikes led by Rideshare Drivers United were in protest of low wages, long hours, working conditions, and lack of benefits.
In the summer of 2019, Uber announced layoffs of 8% of its staff and eliminated the position of COO Barney Harford.
In October 2019, Uber acquired 53% of Cornershop, a provider of grocery delivery services primarily in Latin America. In June 2021, it acquired the remaining 47% interest in Cornershop for 29 million shares of Uber.
After California Assembly Bill 5 was introduced, Uber announced that it would not comply with the law, then engaged lobbyists and mounted a public opinion campaign to overturn it via a ballot.
Between October 2019 and May 2020, Uber offered Uber Works, a mobile app connecting workers who wanted temporary jobs with businesses in Chicago and Miami.
In January 2020, Uber acquired Careem for $3.1 billion and sold its Indian Uber Eats operations to Zomato.
Also in January 2020, Uber tested a feature that enabled drivers at the Santa Barbara, Sacramento, and Palm Springs airports to set fares based on a multiple of Uber's rates.
In May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Uber announced layoffs of over 14% of its workforce.
In June 2020, in its first software as a service partnership, Uber announced that it would manage the on-demand high-occupancy vehicle fleet for Marin Transit, a public bus agency in Marin County, California.
In September 2020, Uber committed to carbon neutrality globally by 2040, and required that, by 2030, in most countries, rides must be offered exclusively in electric vehicles.
In December 2020, Uber acquired Postmates for $2.65 billion.
Also in December 2020, Uber sold its Elevate division, which was developing short flights using VTOL aircraft, to Joby Aviation.
In January 2021, Uber Advanced Technologies Group, a joint venture minority-owned by SoftBank Vision Fund, Toyota, and Denso that was developing self-driving cars, was sold to Aurora Innovation for $4 billion in equity and Uber invested $400 million into Aurora.
In March 2021, the company moved to a new headquarters on Third Street in Mission Bay, San Francisco, consisting of several 6- and 11-story buildings connected by bridges and walkways.
In October 2021, Uber acquired Drizly, an alcohol delivery service, for $1.1 billion in cash and stock; it was shut down in early 2024.
On January 20, 2022, Uber acquired Australian car-sharing company Car Next Door.
In 2022, more than 124,000 internal documents covering the five-year period from 2012 to 2017 when Uber was run by Travis Kalanick were leaked by Mark MacGann, a lobbyist who "led Uber's efforts to win over governments across Europe, the Middle East and Africa". The documents were leaked to The Guardian and first printed on 10 July 2022 by its Sunday sister The Observer. The documents revealed attempts to lobby Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz and George Osborne; how Emmanuel Macron secretly aided Uber lobbying in France, and use of a kill switch during police raids to conceal data. The documents also revealed that Travis Kalanick dismissed concerns from other executives regarding possible violence from taxi drivers after sending Uber drivers to a protest in France, saying "I think it's worth it, violence guarantees success".
In February 2023, Uber drivers went on strike in the US and UK to protest wages and fees. They were joined by drivers from Lyft and DoorDash delivery workers.
The company posted its first operating profit in 2023.
In March 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported a trend of popular service apps such as Uber increasing use of in-app advertising, including higher margin personalized content, to increase profits. Uber was showing customers one ad per trip and tried to implement push alerts but changed its strategy after criticism from customers.
In July 2025, Uber partnered with Baidu to deploy Baidu's self-driving cars on its platform outside of the U.S. and mainland China.
Also in July 2025, Uber invested over $300 million in Lucid Motors and Nuro and announced the purchase of Lucid Gravity vehicles to develop a robotaxi service.
In November 2025, Uber launched the in partnership with WeRide, an autonomous driving technology company. This allows passengers who book an UberX or Uber Comfort ride to be matched with a WeRide robotaxi.