[$UBER] Uber Technologies

Ride or Die: The Self-Driving S-Curve

Disclaimer: This is not investment advice

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Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are coming to Uber soon.*

We’re talking about non-Waymo, US-based, unsupervised (no safety drivers) AVs with large ODDs (operational design domains, or the areas in which the AVs are permitted/safe to operate).

What is soon? In theory, H2’26. In H2’26, we’ll have Nuro-powered Lucid AVs (the Lucid Gravity SUV) operating without safety drivers¹ throughout the SF Bay Area (ex-highways).²³

Full-stack NVIDIA-powered AVs are slated to arrive in the Bay Area not long behind Nuro/Lucid, in H1’27 (car OEM TBD). In fact, Uber is targeting the launch of NVIDIA-powered robotaxis (using NVIDIA’s “full stack” — chips, systems and software) across 28 cities by 2028.

Beyond Nuro and NVIDIA, there are a slew of other AV providers (and Uber partners) currently piloting AVs (or close to it), with plans to operate commercially over the next couple years. These partners include: Apollo Go (owned by Baidu), WeRide, Pony.ai, Wayve, Waabi, Zoox, Motional, Volkswagen, Rivian, May Mobility, Avride and Momenta.

By the end of 2028, in fact, Uber will likely have two or more AV providers operating commercially and unsupervised within the same city across, say, 20+ major cities.

*In actuality, Uber already has AVs operating commercially in a handful of international markets. They also do in the US through Waymo in two markets (Austin and Atlanta).

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Whether or not Uber can get AVs on its platform is not the only risk that AVs present, however (in fact, I’d argue that’s probably not much of a risk at this point). I’d say the main risk, and what remains to be seen, is what increased competition (from Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox primarily) will do to the growth and margins of Uber’s mobility business.

An Uber ride is ultimately a commodity product or thereabouts. When someone wants to get from A to B, it doesn’t really matter if it’s an Uber, a Lyft, a Waymo or a Tesla. They mostly just want the best price, and a low-ish (<3-5 min) ETA. Having more options (e.g. Waymo, Tesla) in the market that can provide this is not good for Uber. Even worse is the specter that these AV offerings will get much cheaper over time, eventually displacing human drivers altogether.

Uber, for its part, is well aware of and trying to get ahead of this shift. For one, Uber has its own AV partners, as discussed above, that should allow it to keep pace with the likes of Waymo and Tesla (to what degree it can keep pace is discussed later). Another key initiative is the Uber One membership program. The company has ~50mm Uber One members (growing ~50% YoY) who represent ~50% of all bookings on the platform. It’s a hugely important competitive differentiator in the industry. Uber also benefits from the fact that half of its business does not actually come from mobility (it comes from delivery). And of the half that comes from mobility, only about 40% is generated in the US (the market most prone to AV disruption).

Ultimately, however, the reason Uber is interesting is that, even if Uber were to cede market share in its mobility business, there’s a pretty good chance it could still grow the business strongly for another decade+. This is because, as AVs proliferate, the cost of rideshare will increasingly approach the cost of personal car ownership (before eventually dipping below it, many believe). This will unlock a massive portion of the mobility market, of which Uber/Lyft represent less than 1% of today (in terms of total miles traveled). Once rideshare costs less than personal car ownership (in addition to offering the convenience of not having to park your car, charge it, maintain it, insure it, etc.), where does rideshare’s overall market share land? 10% of all miles traveled? 20%? 30%? More? As we’ll see below, there are not unreasonable scenarios in which Uber ultimately cedes market share (from ~70% today to say 50% or less) but still grows its US mobility business by 15%+ for a decade+.

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Outside of the AV risk, there’s a lot to like about Uber.

The company has a lot of momentum. Revenue has grown by 17%, 18% and 18% over 2023-2025, respectively. EBITDA has grown by 137%, 60% and 35% over 2023-2025, respectively. Monthly active users have grown by 15%, 14% and 18% over 2023-2025, respectively.

As mentioned above, their membership offering is growing rapidly. Uber is the only group that can offer benefits on both mobility and delivery simultaneously — a key structural advantage they just extended to 58 countries (from 34) through the acquisition of Delivery Hero. And the Uber One program continues to get better. As of Apr-26, Uber One members can earn 10% cash back (in the form of Uber credits) on hotels/Vrbo’s booked through Uber (via their partnership with Expedia). This is on top of an additional to 20% off a rolling list of 10,000 hotels — even The Points Guy thinks this is a pretty good deal.

Further, Uber continues to have a deep moat. It operates in essentially duopolies (if not borderline monopolies) in just about every one of its markets around the world (across mobility and delivery). It is the leader or clear leader in most of these markets.

Lastly, despite rapidly inflecting profitability, the stock has traded sideways over the last ~2.5 years. Its multiple stands at just ~10x ‘27e adj EBITDA — quite “undemanding” I would say, if you are a believer in the business.

Hopefully the following write-up sheds good light on the opportunity. Between the two sides of the business (mobility + delivery), the global nature of Uber, and the rise of AVs, frankly it’s not an easy one to connect the dots on. And given how rapidly the industry is changing, this write-up could have a short self-life. However, we do seem on the cusp of a giant “s-curve” in autonomous vehicles. With Uber still the 500-lb gorilla in the space, at a minimum the company should prove to be a very interesting follow over the coming decade(s).

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Business Overview

Just about everyone knows Uber. It’s an app where you press a button, and then a car shows up and takes you where you want to go. It’s also, through Uber Eats, an app where you press a button, and food shows up (or increasingly, other goods).

Uber currently serves (1) ~58 countries with both “Uber” and “Uber Eats” (i.e. “cross-platform” markets) (2) ~12 countries with “Uber” only, and (3) ~23 countries with “Uber Eats” only.

Prior to the Delivery Hero acquisition, just announced in Jul-26, Uber operated (1) ~34 “cross-platform” markets, (2) ~36 “Uber”-only markets, and (3) no “Uber Eats”-only markets.

Pro forma for the Delivery Hero acquisition, the US represents ~37% of Uber’s total revenue. On just the mobility side, the US represents ~40% of bookings.

The company was founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp, and Ryan Graves. The idea for Uber supposedly came to Camp while, of all things, he was watching this scene from the 2006 James Bond film, Casino Royale:

After building the initial app, the three founders canvassed SF signing up drivers. In exchange for free iPhones, through which drivers could access the Uber driver app, drivers joined the platform (it turned out many drivers had plenty of free time between the occasional airport pickup, etc.). Once driver supply was live, and after a little marketing, they watched as demand flooded in. By all accounts there was just about instantaneous and overwhelming product-market fit.

Many will not remember prior to Uber, how comparatively bad the experience was of hailing a cab. You had to call the dispatch, a 1-800 number. Dispatch told you it was sending a cab, but you didn’t know if one would show up in 1 minute or 15 minutes (or if one would show up at all). Payment after the ride was a process like paying for the bill at a restaurant. With Uber, you could hail a cab by touching a button. You could see the cab’s ETA, even where it was on a map. Payment was automatic.

With clear product-market fit, Kalanick and team set about aggressively growing the business. Uber parachuted “launchers” into new cities who would hire a local team, scour Yelp for and cold call potential drivers (and initially pay them by the hour just to sit on the platform), and generate demand through mostly referrals and word-of-mouth. They often ignored complaints from taxi commissions and/or city regulators — launching first, and asking for forgiveness later. Uber Eats was launched in 2014, becoming its own dedicated app in 2015.

As competition escalated, Uber became increasingly aggressive with incentives on both the driver and rider sides. The company became one of the poster boys of ZIRP-era spending, burning prodigious sums of cash. Per the chart below, the company generated around ~$30bn in cumulative operating loses before turning EBIT positive in 2023.

In an effort to reduce its cash burn, over 2016-2020, Uber sold off its China, Russia, SE Asia and India (delivery) businesses, its self-driving technology division (“ATG”) and its eVTOL technology division (“Uber Elevate”). As these cash burning segments were clipped off, as demand pressure from COVID abated, and as ZIRP-era spending faded, the company has been able to rapidly inflect its profitability.

Despite this, however, shares have traded sideways over the last ~2.5 years. The rise of robotaxis has opened up the playing field to new entrants (e.g. Waymo, Tesla), a frightening development which seems to be keeping a lid on the share price.

This isn’t necessarily unwarranted — the rise of AV technology increases uncertainty. Waymo is the clear leader, and has a “1P” offering that completely circumvents the Uber platform. Further, Tesla is a scary specter of a competitor that is seemingly on the verge of L4 autonomy.

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Investment Merits

A Natural Monopoly

I’d argue Uber has historically operated a natural monopoly. It’s a natural monopoly because in markets in which it operates, it has been “rational” for one firm to occupy the entire market.

Drivers mostly care about where they can generate the most earnings. The most earnings are generated by the most liquid marketplace, where the most riders are and the downtime is lowest. Riders care most about low pricing and reliability (ETAs and coverage). The marketplace with the most drivers has the best prices (most supply), the lowest ETAs and the best coverage.⁴

Thus, we have a virtuous flywheel, where the Uber service improves as more drivers/couriers and riders/consumers enter the ecosystem. Any platforms that take drivers/riders or couriers/consumers away from Uber, actually diminish the overall rideshare/delivery experience in a market.

The proof is in the proverbial pudding in that Uber has vanquished its main competitor in mobility, Lyft, basically twice (in both the Kalanick era and then again in the post Kalanick era after Lyft was given a second life). Similarly, mobility groups like Didi (rideshare in China) and Grab (rideshare + delivery in SE Asia) have also come to dominate their respective geos with huge market shares. These markets, once all players are forced to compete rationally (i.e. ex subsidies), have shown that they eventually converge to one dominant player over a long-enough timeframe.

The same, to a lesser degree, has happened in food delivery. Current delivery markets tend to have ~2-3 players, with the #1 player representing ~60%+ of a market (to oversimplify). Breaking into one of these markets today from a standing start is highly difficult. DoorDash, maybe the most sophisticated of all the food delivery operators, has been investing heavily in international expansion and the experience has not exactly been like a hot knife through butter. It’s been a slog rather, and DoorDash doesn’t seem to be making significant progress.

Autonomous vehicles pose a clear risk to the status quo. However, the post-AV world will share many of the same characteristics of the pre-AV world. Riders will care most about cost and ETAs. The owners of AVs will care most about maximizing earnings. The largest, most liquid marketplace will likely continue to win on both fronts.

Highly Attractive Financial Model

Uber is a marketplace business that takes a ~20% cut across all the transactions it helps orchestrate.

Marketplaces can be exceptional businesses. They require relatively little capital to grow and can generate high operating leverage and high margins. Uber is by far the largest “taxi” company in the world, yet it doesn’t own any cars (for now, at least).

Uber has almost 7x’d revenue since 2017 (a 27% CAGR). It has generated a 18% revenue CAGR over the last three years.

In the meantime, adj EBITDA margins have inflected dramatically — from -33% in 2017 to 17% in 2025. Uber generated ~$9bn in adj EBITDA in 2025.

Further margin expansion is expected. Much of this is the result of Uber’s low variable costs. Since 2022 the company has grown revenue by a CAGR of 18% while it has grown opex by a CAGR of just 3%.

I believe Uber will be able to wring out even more efficiencies from its cost structure through AI in the coming years.

With substantial excess free cash flow, Uber now finds itself with the capacity to invest in organic/inorganic growth and AV strategies, while also returning significant sums of capital to shareholders in the form of buybacks.

Uber One > DashPass > Lyft Pink > Instacart+

Uber seemingly has the best membership program of all the delivery/mobility players. And the advantage is structural. While DoorDash/Instacart can offer discounts on delivery, and Lyft can offer discounts on mobility, Uber can offer discounts on both. Uber is also ~4.5x the size of DoorDash, ~10x the size of Lyft and ~17x the size of Instacart (by revenue, including Delivery Hero), so at this point Uber can use its greater size and profitability to swat away attempts from competitors to grab share. These peer groups are public now as well, and attempts to ramp cash burn to take share (a highly dubious proposition at this point in its own right) would be swiftly punished by the market.

For $9.99 per month, Uber One members benefit from a $0 delivery fee (there is still a “service” fee), 6% back on rides, up to 10% off on delivery/pickup orders over certain thresholds, automatic surge savings and other exclusive offers.

For the same $9.99, a DashPass member receives $0 delivery fees, 5% back on eligible pickup orders, and certain member-exclusive deals. But of course there’s no mobility discount.⁵ So unless you believe DoorDash’s coverage/ETAs are materially better than Uber’s, and/or never use Uber on the mobility side, Uber One seems the better choice.

Here is Dara on a Mar-26 Semafor podcast highlighting Uber One’s differentiated position:

“Uber One has been an enormous success. It’s one of the fastest growing parts of our business. We’ve got over 46 million members now, growing well over 50% on a year-on-year basis. And close to 50% of the overall spend on Uber now comes from members.

And the way I look at membership to some extent is we compete against players who are rides-only players or delivery-only players. We have both. And our membership typically is priced at the same level [as our] competitors. And to some extent, I think we look like Netflix, which is you pay a certain amount and we just have more content than anyone else. And the player who has more content is the player who, over a long, long period of time, wins. And winning means getting you to use my services on a frequent basis hopefully for the rest of your life.

And membership, it is a trade-off for the consumer, which is I’m going to pay some money up front. It creates stickiness for you in that ecosystem because you’ve already paid. But what we see out of membership is that the use of our services, both in terms of the amount you spend — members spend about three times more than non-members — but also the cross-platform usage of members. ‘Hey, I’ve got an Uber One membership because I use Uber for rides all the time. Let me try Uber Eats because there’s no delivery fee. Why not?’ That kind of activity, the cross-platform activity also accelerates.”

The growth in Uber’s membership base backs up the attractiveness of the program. The membership program has rapidly expanded over the past four years. From 6 million members in 2021, the program exited Q1’26 with 50 million members growing ~50%. Today, Uber One members represent ~50% of total bookings on the Uber platform (across both mobility and delivery), a surprisingly large figure (which continues to grow strongly).

Of late, Uber has been doubling down on its membership program, further enhancing its differentiation. In Q2’24 Uber introduced Uber One for Students at a price of $4.99 per month across the US. And in Q4’25 Uber began offering Family Sharing, “allowing members to extend benefits to another adult and their teens at no additional cost.”

Further in Apr-26, Uber announced that users could now book hotels/Vrbo’s on Uber (through a partnership with Expedia). Uber One members will get at least a 20% discount on a rolling list of 10,000 hotels, as well as an additional 10% back in Uber credits on every booking. Uber also hinted that Uber One members will soon have the opportunity to benefit from discounts on parking through SpotHero, after acquiring the business in Feb-26. In grocery, Uber announced a “no fees above $60” benefit for Uber One members on eligible orders in the US.

More benefits will likely come. In theory, as the subscriber base grows, it should be easier for Uber to strike partnerships, spinning the flywheel faster. There’s no doubt Uber has circled flights/air travel as a key potential opportunity, amongst other categories.

Here’s a look at Uber One membership vs. other large consumer membership offerings:

This chart, as well as Uber One’s growth rate, would seem to imply that there is still significant room for growth. Uber One looks well on its way to surpassing Costco membership given its 50%+ growth rate, by far the highest of these comps (other than DoorDash). Uber added ~20mm members in 2025 alone. Uber also stands to add perhaps 10-20mm new members from Delivery Hero’s base of roughly ~49mm MAPCs.

Are all these membership giveaways actually a good deal for Uber? you may be asking. Well, according to Uber — yes. While the membership program lowers a member’s profitability initially, over time this is made up for through increased stickiness and greater spend (i.e. customer lifetime value increases).⁶

AVs Should Expand Uber’s Mobility TAM Significantly

According to the FHA, US drivers travel 3tn miles annually (excluding large trucks, which represent ~10% of miles driven).

Today, the rideshare companies (Uber & Lyft) represent <1% of all of these miles traveled:

The cost of rideshare, however, is set to fall significantly (1) once the driver is removed from the car, and (2) the cost of AV hardware drops sufficiently. It’s expected that the cost of rideshare will drop below the cost of personal car ownership sometime over the next decade.

Here is a forecast from Goldman Sachs from Jul-25:

To date, in fact, I think it’s fair to say costs have fallen more quickly than expected. Waymo’s upfitted Jaguar I-Pace is rumored to have cost ~$150k per vehicle, while its newer Ojai/Zeekr might be less than half that, in the $60-75k range. Tesla claims its Robotaxi will have a starting price in the $30k range. Baidu’s RT6 robotaxi has had an all-in cost of less than $30k since 2024.⁷

A fully functional L4 AV for less than $30k would already put rideshare around price parity with personally-owned vehicles in many developed markets (discussed later).

Innovation around vehicle form factor will likely take another big chunk of costs out of the system. Cars today are built to handle extreme use cases. I personally own a car that seats 7, but the vast majority of our trips only transport 1-3 people. Many EVs come with ranges of 400+ miles, but our average trip is just a few miles around the neighborhood.⁸ Different form factors will emerge to handle different types of trips. For example, if you are traveling solo for a few miles in a residential area, in the future you’ll likely get matched with a super cheap 2-seater (that can’t even go on highways).⁹

Assuming 3tn miles traveled, here is how large the US rideshare market could be under a range of price per mile and market share scenarios.

If say the cost of rideshare dropped to $1.50, and rideshare as a % of miles traveled hit 15%, the total market size in the US would be $675bn, as an example.

Note that more total miles traveled could also result from autonomy. People could likely stand living a bit farther from work if they don’t have to drive. Instead of flying from SF to LA, a car could pick you and the family up at your front door and drive you straight to your destination while you nap, watch a show, work, etc. No airports, no hauling around luggage, no dealing with cars to/from the airport, and a door-to-door travel time that would be comparable. You could even book last minute for no extra cost. Further, at some point eVTOLs will be a thing, and likely bookable on Uber, which could be another source of miles on the platform.

Below are some potential growth scenarios for Uber in US mobility, assuming different rideshare growth scenarios and Uber market share scenarios. If we assume the market grows a bit (5%) to $3.15bn, a price per mile of $1.50, that AV penetration hits 12.5%, and that Uber’s mkt share falls to 50%, Uber’s US mobility business would ~7.6x (a 14% CAGR if we assume this takes 15 years).

This is a highly “back-of-envelope” analysis, but it gives us an idea of the potential that AVs could unlock for Uber. Much of the investment thesis for Uber depends on where you land on (1) overall robotaxi market share and (2) what piece of that Uber can retain.

Uber, as you can imagine, has spun this as a $1tn opportunity in US mobility alone:

It’s possible they are right, but to hit $1tn in US mobility, it will likely require 25%+ of all miles traveled to be rideshare.

Internationally, Uber Eats is DoorDash

I actually began my work in this space looking at DoorDash. I was a loyal DoorDash user and had seen a few compelling theses on the business. In doing my research, however, one thing that surprised me was that DoorDash seemed to be struggling taking market share internationally. DoorDash is considered by many to be the best operator in the space, and that dovetailed with my experience as a user. I enjoyed the product, and my feeling from past experience was that Uber Eats was not nearly as good (more expensive, less selection, longer ETAs, no “DoubleDash”). Further, as someone who lives in the suburbs, I’m not a heavy rideshare user. Thus, I wasn’t necessarily a prime target for Uber One.

To my surprise, however, internationally Uber Eats is DoorDash (i.e. Uber Eats is the dominant provider in many of the largest non-US markets). This dynamic is only further enhanced by Uber’s acquisition of Delivery Hero. See below my highly unofficial (i.e. pieced together through various one-off datapoints) table of the leading food delivery players by geo.

As we can see, Uber Eats leads in Japan, the UK, France, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Turkey and Taiwan. By way of the Delivery Hero deal, Uber Eats also now leads in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, the UAE and more. Amongst the major, non-US markets, in fact, DoorDash only leads in Italy, and only by way of its recent acquisition of Deliveroo.

As a result of its higher market share, Uber Eats should naturally have an edge when it comes to generating lower ETAs, better prices, and more selection in these countries. Further, Uber provides mobility in every one of its top Uber Eats’ countries (other than the Philippines), tying the two offerings together through Uber One. Based on this, it makes a lot of sense that DoorDash was struggling taking share. DoorDash is structurally disadvantaged in two ways (less market share + no mobility offering) in almost all international markets where it competes with Uber.

A telling development occurred in Feb-26 when Uber announced it was launching delivery efforts in seven European markets, including Finland, Denmark and Norway. This was surprising because these are some of Wolt’s (the European player that DoorDash acquired in Nov-21 at a massive GMV multiple) oldest and strongest markets. Wolt was actually founded in Finland and is still HQ’d in Helsinki. Finland is not a large market either. So why would Uber seemingly waste its time/money attacking these Wolt strongholds? Uber is not of the mindset of launching into markets in which it can’t compete (over the years it has pulled out of China, Russia, and SE Asia completely and India, Brazil, Italy, and Israel in food delivery). Well, Uber must feel that it has a real shot in these markets, which in and of itself I think is a meaningful datapoint.

DoorDash also recently announced it was exiting Japan. DoorDash launched in Japan in 2021 and Wolt was actually there before DoorDash, planting a flag in 2020. Neither DoorDash nor Wolt were able to ultimately make inroads while Uber (there since 2016) has continued to grow and now accounts for ~60% of the market.

Strong Potential for AI-Driven Efficiency Gains

Uber’s top three most important capabilities might arguably be: (1) its pricing/matching/prediction engines that sit at the core of its marketplaces, (2) developing great apps (which includes recommendation engines, advertising) for both the consumer as well as the driver/courier, and (3) customer/driver/merchant support.

All three of these areas are primed for AI-driven enhancement. And based on quotes from management, Uber is likely only scratching the surface at this point re AI actually impacting its financial performance. Here is commentary from Dara on the opportunity in customer service¹⁰, the opportunity in software development¹¹, and both (from a Mar-25 Morgan Stanley conference):

“So I think every company in the world is going to tell you that they’re using AI and it’s awesome and they’re going to save lots of money. Actually getting AI to work in an enterprise at scale, I’m finding, is really, really hard. It’s very easy to have little — call it, little optimizations that increase some efficiency about 5%, but we want much more than that, right? We want 20%, 30%, 40% increases in efficiency.

And the good news for us is like I’m finally seeing real signs of it. The scale areas where you’re going to see material differences in terms of AI and these larger models and having big impact on our business are with customer service. Now it’s not just easy. You don’t take these models and train them on a bunch of customer service interactions and expect results. It’s smaller parts of the customer service, your history as a customer, are you a good customer, a bad customer, your claim, you said that your food was getting in late. Did it actually get in late? What’s the policy? What’s the communication, et cetera? We are kind of — we have AI models optimizing each of those. Maybe we’ll have one giant end-to-end model at some point, but we don’t [today]. That activity is coming together, which is going to translate into hundreds of millions of dollars of customer service savings, at, we think, better outcomes.

Same thing as it relates to developer productivity. We’ve kind of had, I’d say, level 1 of dev productivity. Earlier uses of products that got us, call it, 10% to 15% improvements in productivity. We’re now hitting the next level. And it takes — it’s hard to get to these next levels, but I think that, over the next 2 to 3 years, you will see — we expect to see benefits in the hundreds of millions of dollars with better outcomes, which is what we’re demanding of our teams.

And I would tell you that it is — it has taken multiple optimizations for us to get there. It is not easy, but it’s absolutely worth the effort that we’re putting into it. And I’m a lot more optimistic today than I was 6 months ago. Like there’s — I’m seeing breakthroughs, and obviously, with the amount of capital coming into the marketplace, the ecosystem is on our side.”

Here is Dara on the opportunity in better recommendation engines, search and discovery (from a Dec-25 episode of On with Kara Swisher):

“But we have long been driven by AI in all things pricing, matching, etc.…But the models, the ability to just build larger models now, right? So for example, if you’re on Uber Eats, you have a ‘sort’ that’s unique to you based on your past behavior and just patterns that we know about you — what your favorite restaurants are, etc. And we don’t want to just serve you those favorite restaurants. We also want to help you explore new places, etc. These models, as they get larger and as we get better silicon are just getting more and more powerful and capable…If you’re shopping with us and you choose oat milk, what’s the next thing that we show you? These larger models are enormously more effective than the last generation of models.”

Steve Jang, an early investor in Uber, in a Nov-24 appearance on Yahoo Finance, discusses the opportunity in the company’s core prediction engines:

“Uber has historically been one of the largest real-time real world applications of AI/ML in the world. The marketplace engine makes 10 million predictions per second on behalf of its drivers and riders and delivery couriers. At its core, it is a giant, global prediction engine orchestrating all this movement. Now, have they tapped into generative AI and all the cost efficiencies and all the productivity benefits there? Not yet. It’s a large scale operation. They’re starting to make those transitions. And when they transform, I think that the cost and the software-like scalability of the company will really come out. You’re seeing today a 40% gross margin with a 10% operating profit margin. That’s starting to look — that’s transitioning into a software company. And so I think with generative AI and all the work that they’re putting in right now to transform their internal operations and their network across the world, I think that’s the second or third area of opportunity for them.”

Uber seems well positioned to capture any AI-driven efficiency gains given it will still enjoy strong competitive moats across both mobility/delivery for many years to come (i.e. gains won’t be competed away).

Uber’s Ad Business is a Monster

Uber Eats is a highly attractive and impactful place to advertise for merchants. Uber Eats generates a ton of traffic and sits right up against the “point of purchase,” where more and more ad spend is flowing (vs. say “top-of-funnel” awareness).¹² Uber also serves an attractive demographic — the relatively wealthy and the relatively young.

The performance of Uber’s ad business reflects the attractiveness of the offering. In Q4’25, Uber generated “well over” $2bn of ARR from its ads business, up “over 50%” year over year.

While Uber doesn’t disclose the profitability of this segment, at least one peer (Delivery Hero, actually) has achieved a ~70% EBITDA margin in its respective ads segment (see yellow box below, from the company’s Sep-25 investor presentation).

I haven’t seen any similar disclosures from other delivery peers.

There are good reasons to believe that if Delivery Hero can generate this type of margin profile, that Uber should be able to as well. Uber has: (1) greater scale, (2) a richer ad targeting toolset (e.g. target certain dayparts, keywords, only new customers, etc.) which helps attract, importantly, enterprise-scale advertisers, and (3) more advertisers (if not now, eventually), which will result in richer auctions and higher CPCs.

If we assume the same margin profile as Delivery Hero, Uber would be generating $1.4bn of EBITDA from the segment, or ~16% of Uber’s total EBITDA.

While this business represents a little over 2% of delivery gross bookings ex Delivery Hero (the target Uber originally set a few years ago for its ad business), management recently stated that this business could, in fact, be much larger as a percentage of bookings (from Q4’25):

“So on ads, we’re very, very pleased with the momentum that we are seeing. As you rightly pointed out, we had many years ago talked about 2% as the potential ceiling for penetration with delivery advertising. What we are seeing is that the opportunity size here is potentially much larger.

And as we think through where we are on the journey with enterprises versus SMBs, SMB ad penetration is a lot higher than 2% and enterprise year-on-year growth is now outpacing SMBs by a lot more. So in a way, enterprise advertising is playing catch-up, and that means there’s going to be a lot of runway here. At the same time, our products on grocery and retail and mobility are a lot more nascent, and there’s going to be opportunity for us to grow there as well.”

The fact that the segment is growing 50%+ would also suggest that there is still much room to grow (and that 2% is not the ceiling after all).

Many of Uber’s delivery peers, in fact, do well north of 2%:

Delivery Hero actually set a minimum long-term target of 4% (see slide above).

Further, it seems we are still relatively early in the ad monetization journey for food delivery. Here is the CEO of talabat making this point (granted this is from Nov-23, or ~2.5 years ago):

Tomaso Rodriguez: “We have a lot of advertising products that you could buy on talabat if you want to grow your business on talabat. The great thing about our advertising product is that we look at ROI for the restaurant that is immediate…We have a cost per click product like Google has, right?…

So those products, we price them in a way that you make your money back immediately. Two or three times the money you make, so that’s the target we have. And for me I mean as a vendor — so if I had a restaurant with something that gives me back two or three times the money that I spend today, the same month, for me it’s a no-brainer. Because the alternative is spending that money on Instagram, right? And maybe I acquire a customer that will come to me and I will get the money back in one year or two years…

And you know the cost of a click versus the order that you get from the customer is is very low. So I would argue that doing advertising on talabat or on in general on aggregator platforms is the absolute most efficient marketing spend that a vendor, a restaurant, a grocery store or whatever could have.”

Interviewer: “So does the cost per click go up for example if there’s more demand in a specific area?”

TR: “No, not today. Today it’s, I would say, because we’re just getting started, and probably our tech is also not so evolved. And so it’s a fixed fee. It depends on the time of the day, whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s also — when Google was started, when Facebook was started — like the first ones that started doing advertising [on these platforms] built huge businesses out of it because algorithms were not so sophisticated and whatever. So I think when it comes to food delivery, we’re a bit at that stage. So it’s a great time for a vendor to invest in advertising right now.”

In other words, CPCs should continue to rise as the industry matures and auctions become more robust. This should provide a meaningful continued tailwind for Uber’s ad business.

If Uber can grow ad revenue to 4% of delivery bookings, and if the overall delivery business doubles (including DH), you’d be looking at ~$10bn of ad revenue and ~$7bn of ad EBITDA (assuming a 70% margin). That would represent ~$5bn of incremental EBITDA for a business that will generate ~$16bn of EBITDA in 2027. This seems doable over, say, the next 4-5 years.

Interestingly, the ads business increasingly doubles as a barrier to entry in food delivery: (1) you can only turn it on once you have massive scale, and (2) it allows you to run the rest of the delivery business at a very thin margin.¹³

Uber’s AV Future: Everywhere all at Once?

It may not appear like it today, but Uber seems on the cusp of bringing AVs to let’s say 30+ major cities across the globe in relatively quick succession. It’s an “everywhere all at once” strategy, employing various AV tech providers, various car OEMs, and various fleet operators (and potentially various fleet financiers) all “at once.”

Let’s look at the partnerships that Uber has lined up in already specified cities across the US:

Note the charts above/below blatantly copy the formatting of these charts from Jackson Lester of AV Map.

We can see that Uber has partnerships announced (or live in some cases) across eight US cities. This includes three partners each for the SF Bay Area (Nuro, NVIDIA and Rivian) and Los Angeles (VW/MOIA, Zoox and NVIDIA).

Uber has even more partnerships lined up internationally:

Uber has another nine international cities announced (or live in some cases) with launch dates all anticipated before the end of 2026. Four of these cities have multiple AV partners lined up, and one city — Dubai — actually has three (WeRide, Apollo Go and Pony.ai).

Uber has its sights on many more cities than just these ~17 combined, however. They clearly intend to expand their Nuro partnership well beyond just the SF Bay Area and Houston, given they’ve committed to purchase 35,000 vehicles from Nuro/Lucid over the next ~5 years. Uber has committed to at least 10,000 AVs from Rivian by 2028. Further, Uber announced with NVIDIA an intention to be in “28 cities by 2028” with “full-stack” NVIDIA-powered AVs.

Below is commentary from Ali Kani, VP of Automotive at NVIDIA, from a Mar-26 Turing Post podcast. He states that NVIDIA has fleets in 20+ cities today gathering data and laying the groundwork for AV introduction. Once NVIDIA’s self-driving software is ready (targeting initial rollouts in H1’27), NVIDIA anticipates going live across the remaining cities quickly thereafter.

“We’re sending a fleet, like, everywhere right now. So what we did was we identified 20 cities which are relatively unique. So it’s technical, it’s like what are the most unique cities? And then we also included where are most of the customers going to be? Because that’s another area where it’s like, ‘Hey, we care about this. Don’t just think it’s the same and let’s skip that town.’ Then we send a fleet of cars there to test and also get data. And then based on that — the model is very generalist. So it’s pretty good but we make sure that it’s as good everywhere. And then we’ll slowly release it as our metrics tell us that we’re ready, but it will be kind of nationwide.”

In all, Uber has laid out a target of being the largest facilitator of AV trips by 2029. From its Q4’25 “AV Spotlight” and prepared remarks:

“By the end of 2026, we expect to be facilitating AV trips in as many as 15 cities globally, with a roughly even split of U.S. and international cities. And by 2029, we intend to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world. AVs will change how trips are supplied, but not how demand is aggregated. History suggests that over time as supply fragments and technology commoditizes, the platform that can bring the highest utilization to assets, and superior reliability to customers, will capture a large share of value. That is the role Uber is set up to play.”

Even if Uber “misses” this target, it should be well on its way to a significant amount of AV supply live on the platform by 2029.

Overall, I think an underrated aspect of the Uber story is that, in certain ways, Uber is well ahead of the pack in terms of AVs. Yes, Uber doesn’t have the cars and the technology yet (though this is coming). However, in the meantime, they are laying the groundwork on much of “the rest” that will be needed for AVs. And “the rest” is really important and a really significant lift.

AVs need to be maintained, cleaned, charged, parked over night/during off-peak hours, and insured. They potentially could use help being financed. AVs need to be positioned well in a city to maximize earnings. The operator needs to know when an AV is about to run out of battery, or when the air pressure in its tires are too low. AVs will need on-road support (i.e. an asset may need to be recovered in the field, etc.). Lost items will need to be managed. The AVs need to be integrated into a hybrid platform that understands when to dispatch an AV and when not to (is a pick-up/drop-off within the ODD, is a human needed to enter a gate code to a private community). In-vehicle experience needs to be managed (e.g. access to sound, temperature, rider support).

All of these tasks that once fell mostly to the driver, will need to be subsumed by other players in the ecosystem. Uber’s answer to this is (1) its Autonomous Solutions offering (discussed later on), introduced in Feb-26. It’s a diverse set of capabilities that take on much of the burden of actually operating a commercial rideshare service (and that no other players can match today). (2) To handle fleet operations Uber will leverage the relationships it’s developed with just about every rideshare fleet operator in existence, from the very small to the very large. These are the same fleet operators that will be servicing (and in some cases buying) many of the AVs that will go onto the Uber marketplace. (3) Lastly Uber is prepared to step in to develop charging infrastructure and depots where its partners may not have the resources or desire.

Here is management from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference, commenting on how Uber is engaged in leasing conversations for AV depots across 50 (50?!) different sites related to just their 2027 deployments:

“From our perspective, when we think through this deployment curve over the next few years, once we start getting conviction that the software is going to hit the mark and it’s going to get to that L4 deployment with superhuman safety, our efforts start shifting to a couple of other priorities.

The first one is securing OEM supply, right? We need to ensure that any of our partners who can deliver that kind of software have enough scale volumes coming to them, and then that volume can get deployed on Uber’s network.

And then the other thing we have to do is to ensure that we are bringing AV infrastructure on the ground. And for instance, for our 2027 deployments, we’re already scouting sites across our footprint. We already have about 50 different sites that we are beginning to get into leasing conversations, and those deployments will start once we have the software there.”

Of course we haven’t even mentioned the fact that Uber already has a 1P app with tons of aggregated demand. Everyone else (Waymo, Tesla) still need to get customers on their app. They need to provide customer support. They need to handle payments/fraud. They need different “products” like “reserve,” “shared routes,” XL, etc. Uber, of course, has had these things dialed in for awhile now, and these aren’t trivial things.

So while Uber may seem behind on autonomy today, I believe they’re actually well ahead in many important ways. Uber is laying the groundwork to scale AVs. They are just waiting on the tech and the cars.

Attractive Valuation

If we adjust for the impact of the Delivery Hero acquisition, Uber trades for just ~10x ‘27e non-GAAP EBITDA and ~12x ‘27e non-GAAP EBIT (burdened for SBC).

Others

• Delivery + Mobility Synergies. Having both delivery and mobility offerings creates synergies for Uber beyond simply the Uber One membership.

  • Lead Gen. The Uber app is the largest source of new users for Uber Eats — larger than Google, Instagram and Facebook, combined.¹⁴ About 30% of Eats’ first time orders come from Rides.¹⁵ Only ~1 in 5 Uber MAPCs are active across both segments today, a clear opportunity for Uber (they are highly focused on pushing this north of 50%).¹⁶ Users that are active across both businesses spend roughly 3x those that aren’t.¹⁷

  • Driver Recruitment. Uber Eats couriers are easier to pull into the Uber ecosystem than Uber mobility drivers (mobility drivers require background checks, car inspections, etc. while couriers do not). Once couriers are in the Uber ecosystem, however, they are a much easier “cross sell” for Uber mobility. Thus, Uber Eats is an important source of new driver recruits for Uber mobility.¹⁸

  • Labor utilization. Uber should be able to keep its drivers/couriers more utilized as a result of its multiple offerings. Better utilized labor should result in lower prices, all things equal. This might be especially critical in suburban mobility. The suburbs would normally be very expensive to cover from a mobility standpoint due to a lack of density. However, because Uber drivers can stay occupied on the delivery side, it allows Uber to cover the occasional mobility ride (and do it at a reasonable price).
    
    The same concept might apply in the AV world, where having both offerings could drive better utilization of AVs (from Q4’25):
    
    “If you really think about the long, long game, one of the key elements is going to be what companies are able to utilize these cars in the troughs where they will largely not be busy. And having delivery and freight as part of our logistics ecosystem gives us an opportunity to actually use these vehicles at a structurally higher utilization than anyone else. We have the network utilization. We’ve already demonstrated that our network is driving higher utilization even in a circumstance where supply is really low. As supply increases, the utilization advantage that we have, both on the mobility-only network, but then for delivery, for freight, for last mile delivery is going to be super interesting. And it’s a structural advantage that we have that’s not available to any other player.”

• Strong Management. I’m a believer in Uber management (discussed later on). They are “doing the basics” well: (1) keeping take rates low, (2) highly focused on building marketplace “supply,” (3) building an attractive Uber One membership program, and (4) squeezing more and more efficiency/profitability out of the marketplace. I think they are doing satisfactory work re capital allocation as well.

• Hybrid AV/Human “Workforce.” Of course Uber has something else that Waymo, Tesla, and Amazon don’t — human drivers/couriers. This, for a period of time, will allow Uber to both meet peak demand (by flexing its “supply” base up with human drivers) while also keeping AVs maximally utilized (they can be reserved for “baseload” supply). If your platform is AV-only, like Waymo’s, you will have to make a trade-off in one direction or another (better coverage vs. higher utilization).

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Investment Risks

Waymo

Waymo is doing just fine. It’s the only group in the US with a real commercial robotaxi service. They are live in ~15 cities, with another 15+ lined up for near-term expansion. In the markets in which Waymo has launched 1P, it’s clearly taking share. It’s fresh off raising $16bn at a $126bn valuation from a laundry list of top investors including Sequoia, Dragoneer, a16z, Silver Lake, Kleiner Perkins, etc. They just launched the Ojai vehicle, their first vehicle purpose-built for autonomy (i.e. not a full retrofit).

As we are seeing with Waymo, when you remove the driver from the car, the market opens up to additional players. Waymo doesn’t need to recruit drivers to a platform with no demand on it (a money incinerating proposition), because they can just seed the platform with many thousands of robotaxis — no human drivers necessary.

And users generally love the Waymo “product.” It’s safer than a human driver. Most riders prefer to be alone in a car. The cars are brand new and clean, unlike many Ubers. It’s also a futuristic experience. While ETAs are generally higher, coverage is spottier and pricing is higher, Waymo has taken material share relatively quickly. Here is a look at SF rideshare market share since Waymo’s launch in Aug-23 through Apr-25:

Here is additional market share data across a broader set of Waymo markets. Over time Waymo has climbed into the 15-20% range, for now, in Phoenix, SF and LA (its most mature markets).

And this is with Waymo choosing to be “constrained” on the supply-side. They are not flooding any given market with AVs, but rather seem to be aiming for more “baseload” capacity. Peak-to-trough demand over the course of a day is ~4x, so if Waymo were to put enough AVs in a market to handle peak demand, they’d be stuck with many of their cars sitting idle during troughs.

What is worrisome about Waymo for Uber:

• Leading AV Tech. Waymo is the undisputed leader in AV tech. They have real, commercial, driverless deployments all across the country. Where I live — the SF Bay Area — they are ubiquitous (even in the suburbs). With more miles comes more data and more edge cases “solved.” Even when new AV offerings come into the fold, for those especially concerned with safety, the Waymo “Driver” will likely continue to be the safest option for at least the next few years. It’s hard to say exactly how far Waymo is ahead of the pack, and when other providers will have robust enough solutions to safely operate large, flexible ODDs.

• Physical World Build-Out. First out of the gate with robotaxis, Waymo is securing depots/charging infrastructure as well as partnering with leading fleet operators all across the US (and soon internationally). While Uber can and will do the same, it’s got to be a little depressing to see Waymo settling in like this for the long haul. Within the next couple years, Waymo will likely have infra up and running across 30+ major cities.

• Certain Cost Advantages. I’d assume Waymo can train its models at below market rates on Google hardware (Waymo’s in-car chips are NVIDIA GPUs, for now). In its 1P markets where Waymo goes direct to consumer, Waymo pays no “Uber tax.” Also Waymo has its Waymo “Driver,” of course. Thus, it does not have to pay a AV software “licensing fee” (vs. Uber which has to pay this indirectly, like in the case of its Nuro/Lucid robotaxis). These are cost advantages for Waymo.
  
  However, of course Waymo also needs to invest considerable sums to develop its “Driver” as well as its “1P” service. Thus these cost advantages only really kick in at massive scale. Further, if we take NVIDIA’s Alpamayo-powered vehicles (where the software is open sourced), Uber can also enjoy a cut-rate fee for AV software.

• Google-Backed. Waymo is backed by Google, a monster of a company with a market cap of ~$4tn. Google can afford to be loss-making in its AV/rideshare efforts longer than just about anyone.

What is not so worrisome about Waymo for Uber:

• Structural ETA Issues. Waymo can’t really build enough AVs to handle peak traffic hours — for now. Peak-to-trough is ~4x over the course of a day (and the size of a peak also varies over the course of a year in any given market). If Waymo had enough cars to handle peaks, then they’d have a lot of cars sitting idle during troughs. You can see them running into this issue already today. Their wait times in California have flatlined at around 18 minutes, according to the Driverless Digest:

  

  Wait times for Waymo are not nearly this bad in other geos, it should be noted. However, it seems it will likely continue to be challenging for Waymo to offer low ETAs during peak hours. Many will not want to have to bother with switching between apps (Uber for peak hours, Waymo for off-peak), especially when Uber eventually has sufficient AV supply (and where presumably rates are comparable).

• AV Alternatives Are Coming. As alluded to in the intro, a number of other AV providers are going to launch offerings in the coming years. Waymo being the sole provider of self-driving likely isn’t going to last much longer. More on this later.

• No Membership / Lock-In. Waymo doesn’t have a “comprehensive” membership program like Uber One. For many, it will give Uber the edge, especially once Uber has sufficient AV supply.

• Still Limited Geo Coverage. When you leave your home city, or home country, Waymo might not have you covered. This will be the case for awhile. While not necessarily the end of the world, this will be a headwind for a membership product, a business product, etc. It will also make it a little harder to build stickiness with some users, when these users can’t just open one app all the time, no matter what. Around 40% of US-based Uber mobility users took rides outside their home cities in 2025 (and in total, ~1.5bn trips were taken outside of home cities, or ~10% of total trips).

• Lack of “Products.” Waymo doesn’t yet do shared routes, “wait & save,” “reserve,” elite, XXL, pets, car seat, etc. They don’t have “Waymo for business.” Uber has you covered no matter what you need.

• Coverage of Suburbs. Uber management has stated a couple times that they believe that AVs will have a difficult time serving the suburbs for some time (though I haven’t seen them explain exactly why).¹⁹ My assumption is simply that utilization will be that much lower, and deadheading trips that much longer on average. Uber doesn’t have to absorb the costs of idle drivers (they only pay per trip). However, Uber does need to compensate drivers for this lack of utilization with, I assume, higher rates, which provides air cover for Waymo to also charge more. It could be the case that Uber drivers being able to toggle between driver/courier mode in the suburbs is a big advantage when it comes to offering mobility in the suburbs. Uber can keep its couriers utilized making deliveries in the suburbs, and when the occasional ride is requested, Uber will have the coverage (and can provide the ride at a low enough cost to make it interesting for the rider). I’ve never seen Uber confirm this advantage, however — if you’ve seen them do so, please let me know in the comments.

• Fleet Financing. Waymo owns all of its own fleet today. It may have a harder time bringing in financial partners to own cars (and thereby offload some of its capital intensity). Partners want high returns and low risk. If you have a less liquid marketplace (i.e. lower revenue generation per vehicle), and one that is less established (and therefore more risky), it may prove to be harder to lure in financial partners. There’s no guarantee Uber won’t have similar issues, but Uber seems much better positioned on this front.

I do wonder what differentiation Waymo brings in a world where Uber has sufficient AV supply. Waymo’s advantage right now is its lack of drivers, cleaner/newer cars, and a futuristic experience, from what I can tell. Do these not all go away in a world where Uber has plenty of AV supply, say by 2028/2029 (and the user can set an AV preference)? Further, it seems reasonable to assume that Uber should still have lower costs, better coverage and lower wait times in all the intervening years between now and then. If I’m a resident of SF (or LA, Las Vegas, etc.) in 2027, when Uber has 3+ AV offerings on its platform, I’m not sure why I’m using Waymo over Uber (other than Waymo perhaps subsidizing fares).

Maybe Waymo sees a path to being the low cost operator over time. Maybe they are willing to lose money (and subsidize rides) over many, many years in order to build the type of scale that could achieve this. The Google backing makes this perhaps a viable option.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know at this point how Uber’s competition with Waymo evolves. Waymo could keep investing with the intention of building a rideshare network that rivals Uber in its geographic coverage and density. Waymo could also decide that, if it’s not gaining enough ground quickly enough, that it is better off simply licensing the Waymo Driver to car OEMs (as well as licensing “driver” offerings for other applications, like delivery).

Tesla

Tesla poses a risk that, in some ways, is even scarier than Waymo.

Tesla at one point was staking much of the future of the company (a ~$1.5tn company by market cap) on self-driving and the Cybercab. It has been on the cusp of autonomy for years, seemingly. Tesla is dangling the idea of a $30k Cybercab, which would undercut Uber (and Waymo) significantly on price (and of which Tesla could manufacture 2mm annually, they claim). Tesla has a huge number of vehicles on the roads today (~9mm) that they claim could be instantly flipped into Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet.

Furthermore, Tesla has a clear desire to go 1P. It has also signaled a likely aggressive approach to pricing, charging far less than Uber and Waymo in its Robotaxi pilots in SF and Austin. Tesla claims to have driven 1.7mm paid Robotaxi miles (across SF and Austin) as of Q1’26:

In Apr-26, Tesla announced the expansion of its Robotaxi pilot program into Dallas and Houston. In Jul-26, they added the Miami market (giving Tesla 5 markets in total).

Perhaps there is a world where Tesla can “flip a switch” on its Robotaxi initiative more broadly once the tech is ready. In such a world, Uber would suddenly have to deal with aggressive competition from a very large and fully integrated car OEM with structural pricing advantages.

What is worrisome about Tesla for Uber:

• Cost Advantages. Tesla seems to have the lowest cost hardware “bill of materials” in the US for robotaxis. It’s Cybercab is purpose built for autonomy. It has no steering wheel, pedals, or rearview mirrors. It’s “sensor suite” is the lowest cost in the industry (no LiDAR, no radar, just eight cameras). It employs custom-built Tesla silicon for its in-car compute needs. It’s manufactured in a factory — Giga Texas — that seems truly innovative.
  
  However, Tesla is far from the most scaled car OEM. It has respectable sales in the US with around the #9th and #17th best selling cars (and if looking just at EVs, the top two models by far).

  

  But this is not exactly a dominant position. Further Tesla vehicle deliveries actually fell by 9% YoY in 2025.
  
  In terms of the top selling car brands in the world by units, Tesla does not rank in the top 15:

  

  If we look out a few years, Toyota and BYD seem like they will be the clear leaders (BYD grew units sold by 31% in H1’25). It doesn’t strike me like there’s a path for Tesla to build cars at a materially lower cost than these top players longer term, given the scale differential (even considering some of the innovation Tesla is bringing).
  
  In fact, Tesla is already, by far, not the low cost EV producer globally — that crown belongs to the Chinese manufacturers, most notably BYD and Geely. BYD’s latest Seagull EV comes equipped with LiDAR and a “mid-tier” smart driving system (aka Level 2+/2++) for just ~$13,400. Baidu’s RT6 Robotaxi (manufactured by JMC) was introduced way back in May-24 at a sub $30k price tag. While Chinese cars are effectively locked out of the US market (owing to massive ~100% tariffs), they are sold (and taking share) in most other markets (including Europe, Latin America and SE Asia). Further, while Chinese vehicles aren’t sold in the US, Waymo’s Ojai vehicle, which it recently introduced in the US, is built on a Chinese vehicle platform manufactured by Geely. Thus, as a robotaxi operator, Uber might still have a chance at using Chinese-built AVs in the US.
  
  Here is Uber management from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference on Uber’s partnerships with Chinese AV providers in international markets
  
  ”So what we’re seeing in those international markets right now, because we have 3 distinct partners who are already capable of deploying AVs on our network, which is Baidu, WeRide and Pony, we are beginning to see the scenarios where you start seeing a variety of supply coming. So in Abu Dhabi, for instance, we already have WeRide with a driver-out solution. In Dubai, we’ll likely have players like both WeRide and Baidu going on our network and bringing their services to the market. And in that kind of a world, you don’t have a lot of conflict where your partners may be thinking about, ‘Should I go 1P? Should I go 3P?’ They’re trying to get to speed to market and the fastest way to get that kind of an outcome is to work with Uber and also work through all of these solutions we bring, both in terms of our fleet partnerships as well as the Uber Autonomous Solutions kind of stack that you just saw the video right before our chat. We are beginning to see that kind of a theme play out there.

  
  From a cost standpoint, the Chinese partners we’re working with are at a price point for their hardware and software, which is better than anything we are seeing anywhere. So they will certainly have an advantage there. And the fact that they don’t have philosophical debates about whether they want to do 1P versus 3P puts them in a place where they’re maximizing revenues against the lowest cost structure, and that just gives them a leg up in how quickly they can ramp up.”
  
  So while Tesla has a leg-up in the US on hardware costs, it doesn’t seem insurmountable over the fullness of time. Furthermore, in virtually all non-US markets, Tesla is far from the lowest cost producer.
  

• “Price War” Strategy Seems Likely? Tesla will probably be acquired by SpaceX at some point, giving it more cash and a longer runway to be loss-making. It will probably have a real Robotaxi service at some point. And at that point, Tesla will probably try some sort of “scorched earth” pricing (in at least some markets for at least some period of time).

• Data Advantage. Tesla has a ton of real-world driving data owing to their large global fleet of ~9mm vehicles operating all over the world. Surely this is a huge advantage for Tesla? Well, according to Ali Kani, VP of Automotive at NVIDIA, data is not a problem for them. Here is commentary from a Mar-26 Turing Post podcast:
  
  Interviewer: “Do you think you’re close to the amount of data Tesla has for self-driving?”

  AK: “So I think since they’ve been doing this longer than us, they have more real data than us. But we supplement the real data that we’ve gotten with synthetic data. Right now, for where we are, I don’t think we feel that data is our problem. We just generate compute [and it] becomes data, right? So we synthetically generate what we’re missing. But the other thing is we’re now in more and more cars. You can buy this car and we can get data [from it]. Eventually, we will be in every Mercedes-Benz car, every Jaguar Land Rover car. And so, you know, I think we’ll have hundreds of millions of hours of data. And I think that’s very helpful for us on our path to level four. This car, for level two, I think we’re fine. But I think getting incremental data and having the compute to train and test those models together, I think what we feel good about our ability to get this to level four. I think we announced we’re going to start doing trials next year.”
  
  Uber, to its credit, is helping to blow up any remaining chances of a data moat through its AV Labs initiative. Here is Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy in May-26 with something of a status update on the initiative. By the end of 2026, Uber’s AV Labs fleet will be generating 2mm miles worth of data every month (for reference, AV operators have needed at least ~10mm miles of data in total to reach their first public driverless launch):

  

  Balaji Krishnamurthy@_balaji_km

  We have been busy bringing our AV Labs fleet to life. Over the coming months, many hundreds of cars fitted with a suite of sensors (cameras, lidars and radars) will be operating on Uber’s network. Importantly, these cars will be generating revenues and completing regular Uber

  

  

  

  

  

  Praveen Neppalli @praveenTweets

  Excited to share the launch of AV Labs at @Uber, a new technical team focused on accelerating the autonomy ecosystem. With advances in AI and end-to-end modeling, autonomy is now a real-world data and learning problem. Uber’s global scale provides a powerful foundation for this

  3:37 AM · May 21, 2026 · 32.1K Views

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  7 Replies · 14 Reposts · 112 Likes

What is not worrisome about Tesla for Uber:

• Fading AV Tech Leadership. Tesla is falling back into the pack on AV tech. Below is an account of one of Tesla’s first Robotaxi rides in Dallas from Apr-26 (it was also written up by Business Insider):

  

  TexasTSLA@TexasTSLA

  Welcome to Dallas bud 😅😅🤣 Dear @Tesla FSD users have said multiple times nav and map data is 🥔 and needs to be improved @robotaxi misses its exit! ROBOTAXI DRIVES ON THE HIGHWAY and freaks out!! THEN TRIES TO PULL OVER AS TRAFFIC IS FLYING BY 80-90mph!!! Rider

  

  1:37 AM · Apr 19, 2026 · 592K Views

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  257 Replies · 177 Reposts · 2.22K Likes

  The Robotaxi (1) misses its exit, (2) gets on the highway (surely not in its ODD), (3) slows down to 20 MPH on the highway while trying to pull over, (4) rider support attempts to call rider but can’t get through, (5) speeds back up, presumably driven by rider support (unclear), (6) takes the passenger to the wrong destination, (7) gets stuck circling a random hotel until rider support again takes over, (8) has a screen malfunction, telling the rider to “exit safely” as the car is driving 40 MPH, and finally, (9) won’t turn right at a red light, causing rage honking from the car behind it. All of this happened over the course of just one ride! Does this seem like an offering that is ready for primetime?
  
  Reported incident data tells a similar story, which I detail later on. In all, Tesla seems a couple years behind Waymo at this point. They seem behind the Chinese players. They seem in danger of falling behind Nuro. And I think it’s probably only a matter of time before Tesla falls behind NVIDIA.
  

• Camera-Only Sensor Suite. Tesla is the only credible self-driving company of which I’m aware that uses a camera-only sensor suite. Everyone else uses a combination of cameras, radar and LiDAR (which should probably tell you something). Elon’s thinking seems to be that humans only have eyes and can drive, so surely computers equipped with only “eyes” (i.e. cameras) should be able to drive the same or better.
  
  While most agree that a camera-only approach should eventually work, there are two issues with this. One is that we don’t know when it will work. A camera-only approach puts a lot more burden on the self-driving software/algorithms — this may take much longer to sort out. And two, even if the car is eventually able to drive as well as a good human driver, are we not trying for “superhuman” safety? Why would I want to ride in a car that could potentially be much more dangerous than one equipped with LiDAR and radar? Elon is betting that most people won’t care, but he may be miscalculating. I don’t think I’d make Tesla my robotaxi of choice, even if it were a little cheaper, if say there was an order of magnitude greater chance of an accident vs. a Waymo-powered or an NVIDIA-powered robotaxi.
  

• Can Tesla be Great at Operations? It’s hard, if not impossible, for companies to be great at many things at once. Tesla is a great technology and manufacturing company. They have shown less skill, I’d argue, in things like service and operations. For Tesla to operate a robotaxi fleet all over the world while operating a car OEM and building world-class self-driving tech, you’re asking a lot. This is not to mention that Tesla is building robots, installing solar panels on roofs, building its own a fab… One company can only do so much, right? Uber has chosen to be excellent at running its marketplace, aggregating supply/demand, and increasingly operating a fleet of mobility/delivery AVs. This seems tough enough.

• Same 1P Issues as Waymo. If Tesla does try to go 1P, it will have all the same issues that Waymo will have. The same structural ETA issues. The same geographic coverage issues. The same suburbs issue. The same lack of products. The same lack of membership offerings. Etc.

• Who’s Going to Own the Cars? Same issue as above for Waymo. Someone needs to own and finance these cars. Uber’s plan is to eventually bring in 3P owners and financing providers. But for a group like Tesla, it’s going to be harder to line up these parties given the uncertainty around Tesla’s 1P network. If Tesla were forced to own its own fleet, its unclear if they’ll have the resources to pull that off.

If it’s hard to see how things play out with Waymo, it’s even harder with Tesla.

I could see Tesla launching a more robust Robotaxi effort over the next couple years and making life difficult for Uber in many geos. I could also see Tesla’s self-driving efforts lagging for many years before the company eventually pulls the plug on any type of 1P effort. I wouldn’t want to have to bet on the latter scenario, however.

Amazon/Zoox

Perhaps normally, an industry with 3 massive contenders might deter other players from entering. However, that’s not going to be the case with Amazon/Zoox.

What is worrisome about Amazon/Zoox for Uber:

• Also Massive. Amazon, like Google and Tesla, is also enormous. They are the company that invented “your margin is my opportunity.” It’s in their DNA to invest deeply for very extended periods in large markets — that’s what they do.

• Self-Driving Tech is Existential. Amazon has every reason to develop self-driving tech. Even if Amazon completely fails with robotaxis, it still needs it for its retail business. There is no future world where Amazon doesn’t have its own self-driving technology. So even though Zoox is a bit behind today, at some point they will cross the finish line.

• Huge Membership Base. Everyone reading this post likely has a Prime membership. Amazon has ~5x more prime members (~260mm) than Uber has Uber One members (~50mm). Amazon thus has a powerful distribution wedge that Tesla and Waymo do not.

• 1P Desires. Amazon seems to strongly desire a 1P offering. Yes, Zoox has formed partnerships with Uber. In Las Vegas starting this summer and in LA by mid-2027, Zoox vehicles will be available on the Uber app. However, Zoox will still have its own app in these markets. Further, Zoox is not partnered with Uber in SF, Zoox’s most mature market. Zoox is also coming soon to Austin and Miami, and no partnerships with Uber have been announced there.
  
  Here is CEO Aicha Evans from a Oct-24 TechSurge podcast on the importance of owning the customer relationship:
  
  “It takes a lot of capital to deploy this. You, I remember, taught me a very important lesson which is ‘access to the customer.’ Thou who talks to the customer, builds the business, right? And I think what you will see in the future is the conundrum of partnering with Uber or not. At the end of the day, if we’re going to spend billions of dollars building this hard technology with a fairly low barrier of entry to get to the customer ourselves, why should we give that up? Unless it makes sense to partner and I think those questions are still open.”
  
  While Zoox may have to partner with Uber in more markets in order to drive demand, it seems they would do so only begrudgingly. So while the two are partners today, I would not characterize their partnership as “stable.”

• On-Demand Delivery Encroachment. Amazon is more and more a direct competitor of Uber Eats. Amazon is apparently crushing it in groceries.²⁰ Free same-day delivery is increasingly commonplace. Nobody seems better positioned than Amazon to vie for Uber’s turf as the best combined mobility + delivery service (unified by a membership offering).

What is not worrisome about Amazon/Zoox for Uber:

• Trailing AV tech. I think it’s fair to say Zoox is trailing in AV tech today. However, it seems likely Zoox will get to L4 over the next few years.

• Same 1P Issues as Waymo. If Zoox does try to go 1P, it will have many of the same issues that Waymo/Tesla will have. The same structural ETA issues. The same geographic coverage issues. The same suburbs issue. The same lack of products. Etc.

Will AVs Stunt Uber’s Growth over the Next Few Years?

AVs will expand the overall rideshare TAM over time. However, could there be a scenario where AVs take share from human rideshare faster than the overall rideshare market expands? Say if prices don’t fall quickly enough? Such a result could spell rough times for Uber shareholders.

The first set of defense Uber has is that most of its business (I estimate ~90% of EBITDA) is not exposed to AV risk over the next few years.

About 60% of EBITDA today comes from the mobility business (this should fall as the advertising business continues to ramp, but let’s ignore that for now). Of mobility bookings, ~40% is generated within the US²¹ (but let’s assume 60% of profits come from the US — a geo like India, for example, is still lossmaking). And of US mobility profits, we know ~75% comes from outside the top 20 cities.²²

Thus, if over the next few years we assume AVs won’t be able to reach the suburbs, we are talking about only ~9% of profits (60% x 60% x 25%) even being threatened by Waymo/Tesla — a pretty small piece of Uber’s business (and I believe this ~9% will shrink somewhat over the next couple years as the ad biz grows and as Uber further penetrates the suburbs). If we look at this on a revenue or bookings basis, it is even less (closer to ~6%). If AVs do prove able to serve let’s say 50% of the US mobility opportunity (i.e. a greater portion of the suburbs), we’d instead be looking at ~18% of profits being susceptible (vs. 9%).

How is the US mobility segment doing today? Surely growth must be slowing? Actually, no. In fact, the company is very emphatically telling us that the US mobility segment is doing the exact opposite — it’s actually accelerating. From Uber’s Q4’25 prepared remarks in reference to its mobility segment:

“Looking ahead, continued improvements in marketplace health are supporting better per-trip economics. New rider growth reached multi-year highs in 2025 and our new rider cohorts are engaging more than prior cohorts, reinforcing the durability of demand and long-term lifetime value. We expect U.S. trip and gross bookings growth to accelerate further in 2026, on the back of a healthier pricing environment supported by lower insurance costs, strong supply dynamics, and accelerating product innovation. Together, these factors leave us well positioned to deliver another year of both healthy top-line growth and strong margin expansion.”

Uber even underlined the bolded part above just to emphasize its level of conviction in this prediction. In Q1’26, Uber reaffirmed this belief that US mobility would accelerate. So whatever impact AVs may have, it’s not going to show up in 2026, at a minimum.

We also have the curious dynamic that AVs seem to already increase the size of the rideshare TAM within a market, even today when they are not lower cost. Below is commentary from Uber’s Q4’25 prepared remarks, discussing how Uber is experiencing better mobility growth in markets with AVs (even when the AVs are not on the Uber network):

“Reality: AVs are likely to drive incremental growth for the entire category. The history of ridesharing has always been supply-led. Our network benefits from every incremental unit of supply added in a city. As supply increases, customers find more value because rides become more affordable with faster ETAs. This fact alone gives us considerable conviction that AVs (as a new form of supply) will expand—not shrink—our total addressable market. Early data supports this view. In Austin and Atlanta, where hundreds of AVs are operating on the Uber network, our overall (AV and non-AV) trip growth has significantly accelerated. In fact, the Austin and Atlanta AV operating zones are now among our fastest-growing areas in the U.S. Encouragingly, the overall growth in these markets was driven by both an acceleration in new riders trying Uber for the first time and higher frequency among existing riders. Importantly, even as AV penetration has grown in both cities, the number of human drivers and their average earnings per hour are both up YoY because of the hybrid-network approach. At the same time, even in a city like San Francisco, where we don’t yet offer AV trips on Uber, the addition of AV supply to the market has grown the category overall. Uber trips in SF accelerated in 2025, and they are growing faster than the rest of the U.S. We are very bullish about the Bay Area as we make progress toward our own AV deployments there within the next 12 months.”

As mentioned above, even in a market in SF where Uber has no AVs on offer, Uber trips accelerated in 2025. It’s a surprising result, perhaps driven by the fact that if more people are taking rideshare more often, eventually they will need Uber for its lower ETAs and pricing.²³²⁴

Further, the only group that’s really attacking Uber at this point is Waymo. And Waymo is still very small. While the company is scaling up quickly, it is doing so off a small base. Waymo is currently doing ~500k rides per week.

Waymo is targeting ~1mm trips per week by the end of 2026, or ~52mm trips on an annualized basis.

By 2030, Bloomberg expects this figure to grow to roughly ~7mm trips per week or roughly ~360mm trips annually.

In 2025, however, Uber did 13.5bn trips between its mobility and delivery businesses. If we assume 50% of these trips were for mobility, and 33% of these trips happened in the US, then Uber did ~2.2bn US mobility trips in 2025. If we assume this figure grows by ~12% annually, then in 2030 Uber might do ~3.8bn US mobility trips. This means that by 2030, Waymo would still only have just ~10% of the US rideshare market. And by that point, Uber’s AV initiatives would be well underway.

From Uber’s Q4’25 prepared remarks:

“As we have said many times before, we have barely scratched the surface of the AV opportunity, with AV trips (on or off Uber’s platform) globally accounting for just 0.1% of global rideshare trips. Given our growth at scale, autonomous vehicles are likely to remain a very small portion of the rideshare category for many years to come. As a point of comparison, our Mobility business is currently adding ~50x the total global AV category volume.”

Lastly, Waymo/Tesla are also trying to scale in an industry (owned fleets) that is not exactly conducive to the kind of explosive growth that we saw in the early days of Uber. Here is Uber management from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference:

“The second thing I’d say here is what tends to be true for winner-take-all or winner-take-most kind of deployments is that they tend to have a very hockey stick inflection curve, and those gating factors we just talked about ensure that this is going to grow at a slower rate than what the fundamental nature of a winner-take-all deployment is. And I think the way I think about this in my mind is the fastest-growing AV deployments right now are, at best, tripling their volumes year-on-year. In the early years of Uber’s deployment, for the first 6 or 7 years, Uber almost 9 to 10x-ed its volumes every year, right? That was the exponential curve, which we were on and where AVs are right now.”

So to recap, AVs currently threaten a relatively small piece of Uber’s business today (especially if we assume the suburbs are mostly off limits). That “threatened” piece of Uber’s business is actually slated to accelerate in 2026. And finally AVs are expanding off a small base, and though rides are growing quickly, there are real constraints around just how fast the shift can go.

If Large, Aggressive Competitors Engage in ‘Growth at Any Cost,’ It Could Suck

In this business, if you have a competitor that does not care about lighting money on fire, it can be especially rough. You can get people to switch from Uber if you make your offering cheap enough. Ultimately getting from A to B, or getting something delivered, is commodity-adjacent. People will switch if they’re getting a good enough deal. And given the large potential prizes in mobility/delivery, and the types of competitors circling the space, we may well get some “growth at any cost” challengers.

“GaaC” challengers has been a persistent dynamic in the industry. Uber itself eventually had to throw in the towel in China, SE Asia, India (in food delivery), and Brazil (also in food delivery), as burn rates were too high for even it to stomach.

Uber and Lyft battled it out for almost a decade in the US. Here is Bill Gurley, in a Feb-26 interview with Stratechery, recounting Uber’s rivalry with Lyft:

BT: “Not just that, but Lyft was about to go out of business, and suddenly they get millions of dollars in funding…You go back a year before, it looked like it was over, and suddenly Lyft has new life because of this.”

BG: “Yes, we could see it in the numbers. The reason, especially in the coastal areas, the brand was taking heavy artillery fire, and people were switching to Lyft. By the way, that took eight years to get some people off of. They would ride Lyft, just because they hated the brand of Uber.”

BT: “It severely impaired Uber’s profitability, I would say, for about eight years.”

During this period at the end of the Kalanick era, Uber cracked the door open for Lyft to raise new funds. Lyft would go on to raise ~$7bn (more than its entire valuation today of ~$6bn) across 7 separate fundraises between 2014 and its IPO in 2019. This gave Lyft the firepower to slug it out with Uber for many years, keeping everyone’s profitability in check.

Meituan, China’s leading food delivery company, is dealing with this problem today. Alibaba recently launched a “GaaC” campaign, and is forecasted to increase its market share from 21% in 2024 to 40% in 2027. Meanwhile Meituan, once thought to have an impregnable moat in China, is forecasted to see its share fall from 73% in 2024 to 55% in 2027. According to this FT article, “Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that Meituan will lose on average about Rmb1 for every instant delivery order this year, helping to push it to a third-quarter loss of Rmb16bn — its largest since going public in 2018.”

It hasn’t been a fun couple years for Meituan shareholders. Here are more quotes from the article:

Even Brazil’s iFood, with some 80-90% market share in food delivery (which you might think would be enough to ward off competitors), is dealing with aggressive new entrants in Meituan and DiDi.

What’s the best defense against a “GaaC” competitor? Unfortunately, the only real option, it seems, is to go scorched earth back, and hope to shut the door on your competitor as quickly as possible. Here is Uber management discussing their response to Chinese rideshare leader DiDi spending aggressively to take share in Latin America. From Q1’24 earnings:

“I think in terms of Latin America and the competitive environment there, first thing I’d say, I’m assuming you’re asking about Mobility, we’re seeing very healthy Mobility volume growth in Latin America, in mid-20s. So we like the market, and we certainly like the volumes that we’re seeing there. I would say that while — I think you’re referring to DiDi, they signaled a bit more capital discipline, we’re not seeing that as of yet. We see DiDi being highly competitive in the marketplace and spending into the marketplace quite aggressively.

Listen, it could be temporary. It might be driven by their desire to show international growth as the China markets have slowed down a bit as the prep for the IPO, but it’s difficult for us to speculate on that. And I’d say, we’ve seen this behavior before, Brian. And we have a very strong record of effectively responding to defend our category position when our competitors spend up and we do the same thing, and typically, we’re much more efficient than our competition in terms of financial efficiency, network efficiency, et cetera. But at this point, we see DiDi leaning in, certainly not leaning out.

And we are leaning in as a response, just like we do with other competitors all around the world. The good news for us is we have a very strong P&L, you see our margins continue to increase, so we have lots of pockets of investments to reach into, but we are going to be aggressive.”

What could deter a “growth at any cost” approach today?

• Uber’s size. Uber’s size is a deterrent. At this point, Uber can clearly spend what is necessary to defend itself successfully in just about any market — so what’s the point in challenging Uber? It has a ~$150bn mkt cap, will do ~$16bn in EBITDA in 2027 (pro forma for DH), and operates across ~100 countries. Picking on Uber today would only really make sense if you are a Mag-7 company.

• Uber One. ~50% of Uber’s bookings now come from Uber One members (a figure that is growing rapidly). That’s a level of customer stickiness that hasn’t existed in the industry historically.

• The industry is more mature. The industry is a lot more consolidated today. Further, most of Uber’s legacy competitors are now public, and scorched earth tactics would likely tank their stocks.

Ultimately, there’s nothing really Uber (or anybody) can do about a competitor going into full “land grab” mode, and it sucks for everyone until somebody throws in the towel.

As mentioned, it seems the only groups for whom it could make sense to challenge Uber are Mag-7 companies. Unfortunately for Uber, three of the Mag-7 (Google, Amazon and Tesla) have robotaxi initiatives.

Uber Partners Can’t Get to the Finish Line on L4 Autonomy

It took Waymo 17+ years and $30bn+ to achieve L4 autonomy. Tesla has been working on (and promising) self-driving for about a decade. Despite a tremendous amount of effort (and a tremendous amount of real-world driving data), Tesla is still at L2+/++.

Why do we think challengers like Nuro (or even NVIDIA) aren’t going to slog away for another few years without fully getting to the finish line?

One strong rebuttal is that there are currently three Chinese players that, while not on the same level as Waymo, have just about solved L4, it seems. Their combined robotaxi fleet in operation is expected to reach “tens of thousands” by the end of 2026. WeRide currently offers autonomous rides in soon-to-be five international cities for Uber. Pony.ai does so in Zagreb and soon Dubai. And Apollo Go (owned by Baidu) is arguably the most advanced of the three.

Another rebuttal is that the path to L4 has gotten much easier since the early days of Waymo. For one, sensor hardware and compute has gotten much better/more powerful and much cheaper, which is a tremendous help. Additionally, the ability to simulate driving scenarios to train a model has become a very powerful thing, somewhat obfuscating the need for a tremendous amount of real-world driving data. But most importantly, the rise of AI/transformers has brought about a second generation of AV companies, which are basically using end-to-end AI to solve for AV. To way oversimplify: a bunch of sensor information comes in (through cameras, LiDAR, radar), there’s a giant neural net in the middle, and driving instructions go out the other end.²⁵²⁶ As one can imagine, training a giant neural net (though still incredibly difficult) is much easier, and way less costly, than employing an army of engineers to basically hard-code driving logic.

Some other reasons for optimism:

• Nuro is close to launching (in ~H2’26) what seems like it should be a pretty robust, unsupervised commercial service in the SF Bay Area. It should be noted, however, that Nuro’s key initial vehicle partner — Nuro — is potentially on the verge of bankruptcy. This would be quite an unfortunate development for Nuro, Lucid and Uber, potentially derailing the whole partnership.

• NVIDIA is NVIDIA. It’s the largest company in the world, and self-driving is an important initiative for them. They have been working on self-driving for ~7 years and are close to launching their own fleet of pilot vehicles (in ~H1’27).

• Some carmakers are going at this alone, like VW (through its MOIA division) and Rivian (which even has its own chips). While we’ll see how good a decision this proves to be, just the fact that they think they can do it, perhaps shows that this is doable within a reasonable set of constraints.

• Waymo has not only achieved L4, but they’ve kind of nailed it. Yes Waymos have issues, but the Waymo Driver is apparently ~10x safer than the average human driver already.

• The reason Tesla can’t get over the finish line may be unique to Tesla: they are the only company attempting a camera-only approach. This increases the degree of difficulty materially, and may be a large part of what’s holding Tesla back.

In all, I think we’ll get at least a couple more players over the finish line reasonably soon. Here is Dara from a May-26 Decoder interview, expressing strong confidence in this belief:

“All the evidence that we see is, yes, Waymo is past the finish line. They’re the leader, they are in many ways inspiration for many, many companies in this industry. They’re a great partner of ours in Atlanta, in Austin.

There are many other companies that are getting to the finish line. WeRide for example, or a Pony.ai, or Baidu, these are Chinese companies, are already at the finish line. And we are in market, for example, with WeRide in the Middle East, and there are players like a Nuro or a Waabi, or an Avride, or a Wayve, all of whom are accelerating to the finish line. And if anything, the speed of getting to the finish line is accelerating.

One, model capabilities are much, much better now, used to be kind of deterministic, you know, kind of code that you had to slog through. Now, obviously it’s learning AI models. ‘Sim’ capability is much better, so that data will go much further in terms of model training.”

Here is Xinzhou Wu, Head of Automotive at NVIDIA, on a Jul-26 Decoder podcast going on the record that L4 will be an ADAS-like commodity feature in less than 5 years:

Interviewer: “The question I have is the mainstream experience feels like you just buy a car and, just like level two ADAS is kind of a commodity in cars now, level four will be a mainstream commodity in cars. You push the button it starts driving itself. How far away do you think we are from that?”

XW: “Well first of all that’s exactly my mission, trying to help the industry to get there. I would say if I need to give a time I would say five years, less than five years.”

Over the long-term, the most likely case may be that the number of AV providers will be whittled down to just a handful, however. The most pertinent reason being that it’s just very costly to train these models. Once a few winners are established, generating real revenue, and extending leadership in their tech, I suspect others will start to fall away. Perhaps the most likely case is that Waymo, NVIDIA, 2-3 Chinese players, Tesla, probably Zoox and perhaps another 1-2 players find some degree of success in AVs.

No More Supply “Exclusivity?”

What if fleet owners make their cars available on any 1P network (Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, etc.)? This is probably much easier to do in an AV world?

I suspect the answer is “yes” and that this probably will happen to some degree. It already happens today — many drivers simultaneously drive for both Uber and Lyft.

Here are reasons this may not happen:

• Uber’s Autonomous Solutions. This offering does a fair amount of things that seem pretty sticky: handling insurance, handling in-car experience including in-car customer support, “control tower” software for fleet owners, handling complex rides (like shared rides, “reserve” and “wait & save”).

• Depots / fleet partnerships. It seems likely that Uber will own many of its own depots/charging infrastructure in certain markets. It may have exclusive partnerships with certain fleet operators in certain markets. If AV owners want access to these things, they’d have to make their cars available on Uber, perhaps exclusively.

• Financing complications. Some AVs will operate like today’s Ubers — sometimes referred to as the “agency model.” There will be an owner, the owner pays for everything (except insurance when driving for Uber) and Uber will take a percentage of the ride fare and pay out the rest to the AV owner. In an agency model, an owner could make their cars available on many platforms at once, in theory. But some AVs could be financed through a “leasing model.” In this model, Uber pays out a fixed fee per mile (with a minimum mile guarantee), and keeps the rest. This provides more certainty to vehicle owners, but could also lock them into the Uber network.

• Other strategies. There might be other strategies Uber could employ, like offering “priority” to vehicles exclusive to Uber’s platform. Something like this might drastically change the calculus for fleet owners.

• Some AVs will likely just be owned by Uber

Given all this, it may not be feasible for AVs to operate on more than 1-2 networks.

Further, as long as Uber is one of the networks that everyone makes their AVs available on, then Uber should theoretically retain its crown as the most liquid marketplace and be able to somewhat sidestep this risk.

Are We Sure Uber is Capital-Lite?

For a capital-lite business, Uber sure is deploying a lot of capital. In fact, according to the FT, the company has committed in the neighborhood of ~$10bn to AVs between its fleet commitments and investments in AV tech providers:

James Chanos@RealJimChanos

Capital-lite models transforming into capital-intensive ones. Now playing at a Silicon Valley theater near you.

UnHedgedChatter @UnHedgedChatter

FT: Uber commits $10bn to robotaxis in strategy shift [Balance sheet anxiety is real.] $UBER

11:24 AM · Apr 15, 2026 · 88.3K Views

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30 Replies · 74 Reposts · 629 Likes

From the article:

“These deals put Uber on track to invest more than $2.5bn in equity stakes and spend over $7.5bn on robotaxi fleets in the next few years, according to FT calculations based on analyst estimates and people familiar with Uber’s deals. The agreements are contingent on its partners hitting certain deployment milestones.”

Quoted in this article is Walter Piecyk, who hosts the AUTNMY podcast (a good listen!), and is a close follower of the space. He believes Uber is transitioning into a more asset-heavy business:

“Walter Piecyk, analyst at LightShed Partners, a venture capital investor, believes Uber’s recent robotaxi spending spree is ‘step one in a complete narrative change’ around its business. ‘I think they are easing people into the concept of Uber owning fleets of vehicles,’ he said.”

While the company is using its balance sheet to seed the platform with AVs, the company has been clear that its preference is to remain asset-light. Here is Andrew Macdonald on a Feb-26 The Compound podcast:

“So Uber’s famously an asset light marketplace. It’s been one of the appeals for investors about our business model and our intent long-term is to maintain that. 10 years from now I don’t want to be sitting here as the largest owner of autonomous vehicles in the world, even if I am confident that we’re going to be the largest network for getting autonomous rides…

I want to have them on our network. I don’t want to have them on our balance sheet. But there’s a difference between what we think the end-state model looks like and what we think we need to do in the next couple of years to make sure that we lead in that end-state model. And I think the reality is there’s a lot of value in having a company like Uber step up and be able to underwrite some of the asset purchases, or in the case of working with OEMs, being able to help them stand up a supply chain on their side and start mass producing these things knowing that they’ve got guaranteed locked in demand from Uber. So we will play that role in the short term.”

Getting more asset-heavy during this transition period seems necessary. The economics of robotaxis are not proven yet (and frankly probably aren’t good at this point), so there is no one willing to buy these cars. And if there is no one willing to buy them, there of course is no one willing to build them. But Uber needs carmakers to build AVs. Otherwise, Waymo, Tesla, etc. will pull ahead even further. So Uber’s strategy has been to use its financial might to buy cars and drive the broader AV industry forward. I have no qualms with this strategy — it seems like the right thing to do.

The question is, will they be able to pull back on buying these cars at some point (with others coming in to take their place)? It’s Uber management’s belief that, as the economics are proven out, investors/fleet operators will begin buying up these cars.

In their mind, the category will “financialize,” similar to how the world of hotels has financialized over the years. In hotels, brands like Marriott and Hyatt no longer actually own the hotels. They own the hotel brand and receive rev share in exchange for said branding and other services. You have independent groups that staff and manage the hotels (i.e. fleet operators, in this scenario). And then you have the groups that actually own the hotel (i.e. the land and buildings). These groups might be anything from a large REIT (that owns hundreds) down to an individual (that may own just one).

In Uber’s view, AV fleets will be similar. Large financial groups like a Blackstone may own big fleets operating in big cities like NYC. Single individuals (like current Uber drivers) might also own perhaps just a handful. And there will be many in between.

From a Mar-26 Semafor podcast:

“So the ecosystem that we see is that in the big cities, for example, there will be very large fleets that are going to be owned by big financial institutions, the Blackstone’s of the world etc. They they will own and finance the fleets. We will build that whole operating infrastructure, the fleet management tools, the recharging etc. And so in large markets, you will have institutional supply.

And then on the on the outskirts of those markets, in a Westchester County, Tarrytown, New York or that area, you’re going to have smaller entrepreneurs. There may be two people with a garage that have bought 20 cars that are running a smaller fleet management operation, and it’s going to be quite entrepreneurial. Hopefully, a lot of those people will be our drivers. And then I do think there will be a minority of individuals who kind of send their cars out. It will certainly be something that you can do.

But I imagine it to be a little bit like Airbnb, where you’ve got these “superhosts.” And then you’ve got — a lot of Airbnb’s volume sure comes from individuals, but there are these “superhosts” as well. You will have “superhosts” in the big cities — there’ll be institutions — and then on the outskirts in the suburbs, you’ll have kind of smaller fleet managers who are entrepreneurs who are building business for themselves.”

I think it probably is true that if there is a healthy, predictable return to be made, investors will come in. However, none of this has been proven out yet, and there are real risks for investors in AV supply today — for example, how long will these cars last, what will residual values be, what happens when cheaper next-gen cars undercut prices, can we trust that Uber won’t be disrupted by Waymo/Tesla?

I also believe management has started to convey an openness to, let’s say, becoming less asset-light. Here is COO Andrew MacDonald from a May-26 Rapid Response interview:

“We have 25 autonomous vehicle partnerships today globally and [are] starting to work with our partners to scale, helping them build out the physical world infrastructure they need to scale whether that’s depot or charging capacity or remote vehicle management or customer support…

I think many models will emerge. I think you’ll have fleets that will own these assets. I think you’ll have financial investors that will own these assets. I think you’ll have individuals that will own these assets. And so whether or not we need to own vehicles directly, own fleets directly, own the technology directly, I think is something that will get answered over time. Our position today is that that’s not our role in the ecosystem. But like any management team, we should always be open to changing our mind. If the facts change or our strategy is proven to be wrong, then then we’ll have to change direction.”

I think the chances are we will see Uber continue down the asset-heavy path for awhile longer, longer than probably Uber initially thought. Over time, as the industry matures, I think it’s also reasonably likely that most vehicles are owned by third parties.

Agent Disintermediation

In the future, some percentage of rides might come through an agent. Maybe you request a ride from your personal assistant agent. The agent knows your preferences, etc. It goes out and books you a ride.

The problem for Uber is that before booking your ride, your agent might compare the cost of a ride on Uber with the cost of a ride on Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, etc., and book you the cheapest one. This would have a further commoditizing effect on Uber — you might not even know you are riding in one.

I could also see this being a problem with Uber Eats. An agent could take your order and check pricing on Uber Eats, DoorDash, or directly with the restaurant. Oftentimes, direct to the restaurant may be the cheapest route. While Uber Eats might ultimately still make the delivery (through Uber Direct in this case), Uber might extract a lower take rate.

A mitigating factor across both delivery and mobility is Uber One, which has the effect of locking users into the Uber ecosystem. However, it’s unclear if the lock-in from Uber One would be powerful enough to counteract this disintermediation.

Other mitigating factors, with respect to delivery, are that (1) it’s not that hard to open the app and put in an order (and there is a smaller chance the order is placed wrong by doing so), (2) I’d say most users like to browse the app to see what they feel like eating and (3) probably only by opening the app will you be able to see what deals are on offer.

Lastly, Uber could also just elect to not allow agents to access its platforms. Amazon has done this in shopping, preventing third party shopping agents from “crawling” its site. I think Uber might ultimately have trouble with such a strategy, however. Blocking personal agents from Google or Meta, for example, seems like it would do more harm than good.

In all, while I don’t quite see the risk yet, I understand why some are focused on it and it’s certainly something to monitor.

Is Delivery Going to Hit a Wall?

Here is Jim Chanos making the case that we can’t expect food delivery to outpace food restaurant SSS forever.

James Chanos@RealJimChanos

Can someone explain to me how investors continue to believe that $DASH and $UBER Eats will continue to grow GOV’s 15-20 pts above industry comps for the next decade…?! It’s not such a small base anymore.

Consensus Media @ConsensusGurus

We may never see a generational run like Chili's had with the Triple Dipper ever again:

9:37 PM · May 10, 2026 · 68.7K Views

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37 Replies · 10 Reposts · 171 Likes

And indeed if we look at Uber Eats and DoorDash’s combined delivery business, we do seem to be getting “up there” in terms of their share of the market. One estimate, detailed later on, puts their combined penetration at around ~10% of total restaurant spend — how much higher can we reasonably go?

At the same time, even Chanos qualifies his tweet above by saying it can’t be expected for the next “decade.” And he is smart to qualify, because Uber Eats and DoorDash continue to grow their delivery businesses quite nicely.

Look at these bookings growth rates from Uber Eats…

and DoorDash…

Uber Eats and DoorDash have grown by 15% and 22% (organic) CAGRs since 2021, respectively. Further, growth in 2025 actually accelerated for both companies. Based purely on momentum, healthy growth seems poised to continue for awhile longer.

For growth to sustain over the medium to long term, however, one probably needs to believe one or more of the following things: (1) that DoorDash and Uber Eats can successfully penetrate the grocery market (a market much larger than food delivery), (2) that DoorDash and Uber Eats can have some level of success with retail and/or their white label delivery offerings (fulfilling orders placed directly with merchants), (3) that autonomous delivery will happen which will lower costs and unlock a greater piece of all of the markets above, and/or (4) restaurants will reduce the cost of making food through automation (ala Travis Kalanick’s Cloud Kitchens), allowing restaurants to take some incremental share from grocery.

I would also mention that folks do not seem to be paying an unsustainable amount on delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash, like some articles would lead you to believe. In fact, total spend on restaurants (as a share of total consumption) has actually never been lower, according to this chart (see red line below) from Mike Konczal.

As noted in Konczal’s article, while delivery spend is way up, most are simply substituting going to a restaurant with delivery. They are not expanding total spend on restaurants. In fact, that spend is continuing to fall, while food at home (i.e. grocery) spend has ticked up.

I think delivery will likely experience healthy growth longer than some anticipate. It is so much more convenient to have paper towels delivered, or diapers in a pinch, groceries, etc. As more and more people deliver, density improves and costs come down.²⁷ As autonomous delivery likely proliferates over the next decade, costs will fall even further.

Additionally, Amazon is relentlessly investing in faster and faster delivery (which drives conversion). As free same-day delivery proliferates, what are other retailers to do? They must offer the same, and Uber/DoorDash are well positioned to be the partners of choice for these retailers.

Here is Michael Morton, a Sr Research Analyst with MoffettNathanson, discussing the impact of same-day delivery in a Jun-26 interview with Stratechery:

BT: “I think the point you made before about speed, there’s a mental shift that happens when you actually believe you’ll get something in a few hours, where it becomes absurd to think you’ll go to a store. Your mind starts calculating, “What if I forget to go to the store?”, “What if something comes up?”, whereas if I order it right now, it’s going to be here in a few hours. That window just closes in terms of even considering going to bricks-and-mortar, and in my experience it drives a really marked shift in your default purchase pattern.”

MM: “You wouldn’t believe the conversion rates — when we tell people we can get them something at the end of the day or tomorrow morning when they wake up, they go through the roof.”

While it’s of course important to be realistic about how much more penetrated delivery can get, I do think there’s a good amount of headroom left.

Other

• Uber Has a Captive Insurer. It’s hard to be good at insurance. It’s especially hard if you are not even an insurer. Uber reportedly self-funds nearly 95% of its total insurance exposure. Thus, Uber is a non-insurer that must run its own pretty giant book of insurance (the company had $12.5bn of insurance reserves as of Q4’25). This is the same book that has confounded actual insurers in the past (which ultimately led to Uber having to self-insure). However, despite this, the insurance risk seems <gulp> manageable at this point. The company reported in its latest 10-K that changes to insurance reserve estimates as a result of prior period claims (a key metric in judging the quality of insurance underwriting) amounted to just $158mm, -$78mm and -$21mm in 2023, 2024 and 2025, respectively. I’m no insurance expert, but that seems like a pretty solid (recent) track record vs. a total quantum of insurance reserves in the multi-billions. I think we can be reasonably confident that after a period of poor underwriting (by Uber’s insurance partners), Uber has gotten its hands around how to price its insurance (for its non-AV business at least). Uber has also made it a point over the past few years to seek regulatory relief to help rein in insurance costs — an initiative that seems to be working.

• Macro Risk. How will Uber respond in a severe downturn? Surely there will be less food delivery and less mobility trips, all things equal? The answer to this is yes — however, all things will also not be equal. There is a curious thing that happens with Uber in a downturn, which is that more “supply” (or labor) comes online. When more supply comes online, prices fall and demand picks up. Uber has made this case (as well as proven this in actual downturns) many times.²⁸²⁹³⁰ So while a downturn would not be good for Uber, it may not be as bad as some expect.

• Assault Lawsuits. Uber is facing more than 3,300 assault lawsuits, which have been consolidated in US federal court. In one of the first of these lawsuits to go to trial (in Feb-26), the plaintiff was awarded $8.5mm in damages. In this case, the driver had no criminal history, and had made over 10,000 trips on Uber with a “nearly perfect rating from riders.” The plaintiff was seeking $140mm in damages. The jury awarded “compensatory damages” but declined to award “punitive damages.” From the article: “In a statement, an Uber spokesperson noted that the jury rejected Dean’s other claims, that the company was negligent or that its safety systems were defective, adding that the company plans to appeal.” In another one of these lawsuits that went to trial, according to article, the jury sided with Uber: “The jury found that while the company had been negligent with its safety measures, that negligence was not a substantial factor in causing the woman’s harm.” More recently in Apr-26, a jury in North Carolina found that Uber was liable for a driver who grabbed the inner thigh of a passenger as she was leaving the front seat of his car, awarding the plaintiff $5,000 in damages. In this case the driver denied touching the plaintiff, and the plaintiff never reported the incident to law enforcement. Uber only learned of the incident 3 years later when the lawsuit was filed. From the article: “‘The jury’s award here should further bring these cases back to reality, as it represents a tiny fraction of previous demands,’ the Uber statement said, adding that the company has strong grounds for appeal because it believes the jury was incorrectly instructed on the question of liability.” These cases are considered “bellwether” cases that will impact what will likely be a large negotiated settlement between Uber and the collective group of plaintiffs (each plaintiff can individually opt out of the settlement, ultimately, if they choose). If we assume the average settlement is $150K, across 3,300 plaintiffs the total settlement would be $165m. Uber recently enabled a “woman-driver preferred” option as part of steps taken to address rider safety.

• Bad AV Accident(s). If we have an especially bad accident (or series of accidents) from AV partners operating on Uber, Uber could develop a reputation for unsafe AVs. Because Uber works with more partners (that are less proven than Waymo), Uber seems more at risk. While Uber is perhaps better positioned in that they would have other AV providers to work with if one provider’s tech was faulty (unlike Waymo), its unclear whether the average consumer would understand the nuance (i.e. “don’t worry — the faulty AVs are gone, the remaining AVs are safe”).

• Waymo/Amazon buys Lyft. If Waymo were to buy Lyft, you’d suddenly have a deep-pocketed, formidable #2 player in US mobility. Even worse might be if Amazon acquired Lyft. Then you’d have 3 deep-pocketed, formidable players. Reasons to not be as concerned: (1) if Waymo/Amazon bought Lyft, it would seemingly detract from their current advantage (that all cars are AVs), (2) human-drivers are likely not seen as the future at either Waymo or Zoox, and having to operate a hybrid offering would ratchet up the complexity of these businesses (both factors making a deal less likely), (3) Lyft only operates in the US and only in mobility, which limits its usefulness and (4) in the SF market share data, Lyft has been taking more of the market share damage vs. Uber, so Lyft might start to see real impairment to its business as Waymo and Uber ramp AVs over the coming years.

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Financial Performance

Ride/Delivery Economics

Uber takes a cut of every “trip” (i.e. ride or delivery) that takes place on its marketplace. In the S-1, they provide example breakdowns of the economics of a trip.

The table below from Uber’s S-1 illustrates two different “ride” scenarios — without and with “excess driver incentives:”

In this example, the total cost of the ride is $10.00, which is recorded as “gross bookings.” The driver earns $8.00 in the scenario without excess driver incentives, and $11.00 in the scenario with excess driver incentives, taking all of the cost of the ride (and then some). Uber records the first scenario as $2.00 of revenue to Uber (which represents a “take rate” of 20%). In the second scenario, no revenue is recorded (a “take rate” of 0%) and in addition to that, there is $1.00 of CoR (i.e. Uber loses money in this scenario).

Incentives are provided to drivers in order to balance supply (# of drivers/couriers) with demand (# of riders/consumers) on the platform at any given time. For example during peak rush hour, or during large scale events, Uber will increase its payouts to drivers in order to activate more drivers in its app (note that Uber will also implement “surge pricing” in order to recoup some/all of this excess payout; “surge pricing” also tamps down on rider demand to help balance supply/demand).

The table below from Uber’s S-1 illustrates the components of a delivery order:

In this example, the total order value is $22.00 including food and delivery fees. This is recorded as “gross bookings.” Of the $18.00 that the restaurant is “owed,” they receive $13.50. Of the $4.00 that the courier is “owed,” they receive all $4.00 (and an additional $2.00 of “excess driver incentives”). Uber receives $2.50 in this scenario ($4.50 less the $2.00 in “excess driver incentives,” which is again recorded as CoR).

Gross Bookings for Uber does not include tips (for both mobility and delivery).³¹ This is actually not the case for DoorDash, which includes tips in its GOV (Gross Order Value).³² Both Uber and DoorDash “pass through” 100% of tips to drivers/couriers.

Note that a couple of significant accounting changes took place following Uber’s IPO in 2019:

• In Q4’20, Uber began recognizing all “excess driver incentives” as revenue reduction, removing them from CoR.

• Beginning in 2020, for certain markets where Uber was deemed the “merchant of record” and not simply an “agent” (primarily the UK, I believe), Uber began recognizing gross bookings as revenue and associated driver/courier costs as CoR. Over the 2021-2022 period, this materially boosted revenue growth rates and the overall “take rate,” though it compressed gross margins (no impact on bookings or overall profitability).³³

• Further complicating things, beginning in Jan-26 following a UK tax law ruling, Uber decided to reclassify all of the UK (ex London) from the “merchant” model back to the “agent” model. This will have the opposite impact of before: revenue growth will slow, the overall “take rate” will decrease, but gross margins will increase (again, no impact on bookings or profitability)³⁴

Uber Financial Model

The flow through from gross bookings to revenue is a little more complicated than the examples provided above.

The main differences are that (1) “market-wide promotions” including the discounts available under the Uber One membership program are also recorded as a reduction of revenue, as are (2) certain “refunds and credits” due to end-user dissatisfaction.

“Cost of revenue” consists of primarily driver/courier costs for mobility/delivery transactions in markets where Uber is the “merchant of record,” insurance costs and credit card processing fees. CoR also includes data center and networking expenses, and mobile device and service costs.

Note that insurance costs (Uber provides “commercial” automotive liability insurance on behalf of its mobility/delivery drivers) are essentially a 100% “pass-through” item. This means that the cost of insurance is “priced-in” to the cost of a trip (thereby increasing gross bookings) but then deducted in the CoR line. Thus, rising insurance costs (they ratcheted up materially over the 2021-2024 timeframe) had the effect of optically increasing the take rate (when take rates are calculated as simply revenue/gross bookings).

“Operations & support” primarily consists of expenses related to employees that support operations in cities, including general managers, driver operations, platform user support representatives and community managers.

“Sales & marketing” primarily consist of advertising costs, product marketing costs, discounts, loyalty programs, promotions, refunds, and credits provided to end-users who are not customers, compensation costs to sales and marketing employees, and the allocation of certain corporate costs.

“Research & development” primarily consists of compensation costs for employees in engineering, design and product development. In the earlier years, Uber’s ATG effort (i.e. it’s self-driving initiative) was recorded primarily in R&D (this business was divested in Dec-20). Substantially all R&D is expensed as occurred.

Gross Bookings

Gross bookings have ~5.5x’d since 2017. This represents a 24% CAGR over 8 years.

As we can see below, a big driver of this has been delivery bookings, which increased by over 30x over this period (vs. mobility, which increased by roughly 3x).

Prior to the DH acquisition, gross bookings was split 50%/47%/3% between mobility, delivery and freight, respectively. Including the impact of Delivery Hero, total bookings were $235bn in 2025, with 41%/56%/2% coming from mobility, delivery and freight, respectively.

Both sides of the business have performed well over the last three years, with CAGRs of 23% and 18% for mobility and delivery, respectively. Much of Uber’s growth can be boiled down to (1) strong user growth and (2) more spend per user. Encouragingly, both factors continue to exhibit healthy trends, as detailed below.³⁵³⁶³⁷

Strong user growth has resulted from a broad set of factors, including: (1) expansion into new countries (like Japan, South Korea, Germany, Spain, Turkey and Argentina), (2) a much stronger focus on the suburbs (an effort boosted by new products like “reserve” and “wait & save”), (3) expansion into younger and older demographics, (4) affordability initiatives (including Uber One and new products like “Moto,” a two-wheeler product for emerging markets) and (5) new products like Uber for Business (U4B generates ~$5bn in annualized bookings and is growing 45% YoY as of Q1’26).

More spend per user has also resulted from a broad set of factors, including: (1) driving multi-product usage (Uber, Uber Eats, groceries, retail), (2) Uber One, which drives higher trip frequency and better retention, and (3) a higher quality product (for Uber Eats, that means shorter delivery times, more merchants on the platform, etc.).

MAPCs (Monthly Active Platform Consumers) / Uber One Members

Growth in MAPCs and growth in Uber One members has been very healthy.

MAPCs have grown at a 16% CAGR over the last three years, and growth actually accelerated in 2025 to 18%. Meanwhile the number of Uber One members has grown at a 3-year CAGR of 57% (Uber One was only recently introduced in 2021). Uber One members hit 46mm in 2025, and impressively maintained a growth rate north of 50% in 2025.

Delivery Hero brings another 49mm MAPCs. If we assume there is 20% overlap with existing Uber mobility users, and that 1/3rd of the remaining MAPCs convert to Uber One members, then in theory, DH would generate another ~13mm Uber One members.

Uber One members now represent just under 50% of total bookings on the Uber platform. This is up from just 25% in 2022.

The number of monthly “trips” (deliveries + rides) per MAPC (a measure of trip “frequency”) shows a healthy looking trend as well.

There is headroom to increase MAPCs and trip frequency much further.

Firstly, only ~5% of the adult population across Uber’s current operating footprint are Uber MAPCs.³⁸ For Uber’s top markets, the number is closer to 15%.³⁹

On top of this, in terms of trip frequency, 50% of MAPCs only use Uber once or twice per month, per the company’s 2024 investor day. COO Andrew Macdonald on The Compound claimed that in Uber’s best markets, monthly trips are around 9 (vs. ~6 across all markets), and that for the top decile of customers in Uber’s top markets, monthly trips are 20+.⁴⁰ Meituan, the top delivery player in China, apparently generates around ~9 trips per month.

Lastly, the percentage of users who use both Uber and Uber Eats together is only around 20%. All of these metrics could seemingly go materially higher.

Revenue

Revenue has grown at a slightly faster overall clip than gross bookings, ~6.5x’ing overall since 2017 (representing a CAGR of 27%).

While, pre DH, mobility/delivery was split roughly 50/50 in terms of bookings, on a revenue basis the split was closer to 67/33 in favor of mobility. I believe the difference mostly arises from: (1) mobility having a slightly higher “true” take rate vs. delivery, (2) higher insurance costs for mobility, and (3) mobility having a higher proportion of revenue where Uber is deemed the “principal,” requiring Uber to recognize bookings as revenue.

While mobility growth has outpaced delivery growth over the last three years, delivery growth of 25% in 2025 significantly outpaced mobility growth of 18%.

Below is a breakdown of revenue by geo. We can see the US grew the slowest of all Uber’s geographies (by a wide margin) in 2025 at 11%. EMEA (especially non-UK EMEA) was particularly strong, growing 31%.

The US is likely growing the slowest simply because it is the most mature of the geos. Many of these other regions have countries where Uber was relatively slow to penetrate, oftentimes for regulatory reasons. Many of these countries have enjoyed outsized growth, as shown in the slide below from Uber’s 2024 investor day:

I also think geos where Uber enjoys high market share in both mobility and delivery (EMEA, Canada) are likely getting a boost.

If we include the impact of Delivery Hero, US revenue as a percentage of total revenue declines to 37% (from 46%).

We can see that “take rates” (calculated as revenue/gross bookings) dipped in 2020 before recovering in subsequent years. For mobility, take rates jumped to a materially higher level beginning in 2022.

The dip in take rates in 2020-2021 was likely caused by increased driver incentives to boost driver supply coming out of COVID (which would have reduced revenue).⁴¹ As driver incentives abated, take rates would have recovered. However, on the mobility side, take rates rose to higher levels than the pre-COVID period, likely as a result of the accounting policy changes in the UK related to Uber being deemed the “merchant of record.” Higher mobility take rates would have also been driven by increases in insurance costs, which surged during the 2021-2024 period.

Note that the calculated take rates are muddied by the factors discussed above. Management oftentimes refers to ~20% as a more accurate representation of the “true” take rate across both business lines.

For example, here is Dara on the HD in HD podcast (Nov-25):

“The company does about, we’ll [say a] run rate of $200 billion. Our take rate there, our ‘true’ take rate — because the accounting is a little funky — is probably 20%. So that’s about you know call it $40 billion that we uh bring into revenue and profitability off of that is probably $8.5 to $9 billion.”

Gross Margin

Gross margins stepped down during the 2020-2022 period and have settled into the ~40% range.

I believe the step up in GMs in 2020 was likely due to the reclassification of “excess driver incentives” from CoR to a contra-revenue item. The step down from 2020-2022 was driven by the impact of the UK merchant-of-record changes. Finally, over the last four years, it’s likely that surging insurance costs weighed on GMs (higher insurance costs increases both revenue and CoR by the same dollar amount).

Opex

Uber has demonstrated pretty remarkable operating leverage on its opex lines.

As we can see below, across each functional area, opex has decreased materially as a percentage of revenue.

The categories demonstrating the most leverage have been S&M and G&A which have decreased from 32%→9% and 29%→6%, respectively, since 2017.

Below are the opex buckets on a dollar-basis. Starting in 2023, we can see a major deceleration of opex spend. Total opex has grown by just a 3% CAGR since 2022!

This operating leverage has resulted, in part, from (1) the end of ZIRP-era incentives (equivalent to raising prices), (2) a highly scalable model with relatively low variable costs, (3) savings generated by automation and driving marketplace efficiencies (e.g. better matching, bundling), and (4) the growth of Uber’s highly profitable advertising business.

Here is Dara from an Oct-25 Decoder interview on Uber’s ZIRP-era spend:

“Travis would hire a GM, parachute them into a market. And you’re right, we did go out and buy supply and really we are as a company a supply-led company. Which is first, you build liquid supply, then you invest in demand. You have to, in the early days, you essentially have to price under-market and you lose a bunch of money in a market. As liquidity increases and the matches increase and the efficiency of the market increases, you can start pulling more profits from a marketplace. That was essentially the formula.

And it might have seemed crazy at the time, but I think that Travis and the founding team got it right, which is creating liquidity in the marketplace is exactly what allowed you to get to profitability. And whoever created the liquidity of supply and demand fastest was the one who ultimately won. So in the early days it was all GMs, spend a ton of money on liquidity.”

As ZIRP spend petered out, Uber was able to price more rationally. They could essentially charge customers a little more (or use less incentives) and pay drivers a bit less (or use less incentives). Impressively, the company has been able to sustain very healthy growth through this process (including strong user growth).

Management would also tell you they’ve been able to generate operational efficiencies through the use of technology/automation. Here is Dara from a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast:

“I do think that ourselves and a bunch of other companies went through a phase where capital was a weapon. And basically it was about how much money can you raise in order to spend to capture markets. And having an enormous amount of capital to spend actually hurts operating discipline because it’s painful to optimize these businesses.

If you build an incredible algorithm that is able to predict demand versus, let’s say, can [just] match [existing] demand in a market…That’s one little product that the team has has built. It’s actually a pretty cool product. That kind of [thing] can bring, let’s say, 1% [greater] efficiency into a market. And then you have 15 of those projects and lo and behold, you’re growing the company at attractive rates.

In the early days, someone would throw a hundred million dollars into the market and all of that work would be blown away. So, to some extent, the excess capital actually worked against excellent operations. And so for me, the art was pulling the capital back over a period and then driving excellent operations and efficiency across the company. And it’s something that we’ve been able to do now which is we’re able to keep innovating…and at the same time have a bottom line that grows significantly in excess of our top line…

I would say the pattern for Uber over the past 6, 7 years is using technology to allow us to essentially automate a bunch of, call it, overhead functions. And improve customer service, reduce error rates, match more effectively, price more effectively. If you’re able to use tech to do so, you can grow revenue without growing your overhead.”

Here is Dara from a Jun-23 Acquired podcast discussing how the company uses ML to to enhance Uber’s pricing/matching engine:

“I think we’re in the scale business…One of the secret sauces that we have is we have a very large and capable marketplace team. These are ML engineers who are building out the systems that match price, all of this connectivity. And when you’re working over an ecosystem of two billion transactions a quarter, the data sets that we have, the experimentation that we can do in terms of what’s the most optimal match, how do you price, etc. It’s just a bigger database than anyone else. So every year matching and pricing probably improves by five percent. So you improve your the marketplace throughput by about five percent, everything else being the same, and that’s like free growth. And when it’s on top of call it $120, $130 billion dollar run rate, it gets big and, again it’s compounding. Every year this machinery gets better.”

How does this ML engine help Uber in practice?

One example is an ability to bundle more deliveries. As the marketplace gets more liquid and as algorithms improve, Uber is better able to match couriers on two (or more) deliveries at a time instead of one (currently about half of deliveries are “batched” per Jun-26 Invest Like the Best podcast). When two orders are batched, Uber can afford to pay the courier more, but not quite as much as what Uber would have to pay for two orders delivered separately. The total value of the order does not change, however, so Uber can pocket the difference. This is a very important generator of profits for a food delivery business.

Another example is the ability to improve “bidding.” When a delivery order comes in, or a ride is requested, Uber will send out bids to drivers/couriers until one of them accepts. Uber needs to decide who is the best person to send a bid to first, then second, third, etc. Uber also needs to decide how much to offer for each bid. Here is Dara describing this process on a Oct-25 Decoder podcast.⁴² A more liquid marketplace and better matching/pricing algorithms lets Uber squeeze a bit more profitability out of every transaction.

EBITDA/Operating Margin

The result of strong revenue growth and flattish opex spend has been an inflection in margins. Uber has rather steadily (COVID interruption notwithstanding) increased its EBITDA margin from -33% in 2017 to 17% in 2025.

The Delivery Hero business, once synergies are fully realized, stands to generate a ~19%+ EBITDA margin by my math. Thus, the business should be slightly accretive to margins.

Looking at EBITDA by business line, we can see that the majority of profitability was generated by mobility, pre DH. Mobility generated an EBITDA margin of 27% in 2025, while delivery generated a 21% margin.

Rising delivery margins, however, have been driving much of the inflection in overall profitability as we can see above.

If we add Delivery Hero’s ~$2.2bn est. EBITDA post synergies, we get to ~$11.0bn in combined EBITDA. Of that, ~$5.8bn would come from delivery and ~$7.9bn from mobility (less $2.7bn in corporate G&A and platform R&D).

At the 2024 investor day, the company provided us with an interesting look at profitability by business line by market (for their top 10 markets).

Almost every geo was profitable at the time and almost every geo also improved margins over the preceding 2 years (note this chart shows EBITDA margin as a percentage of gross bookings, not as a percentage of revenue). However, there were still considerable differences in profitability by geo. For example on the mobility side, Uber had both a handful of markets in the ~10% range as well as some that were breakeven (India? Brazil?). Similarly, on the delivery side, Uber had a couple markets in the ~7% range, but most clustered in the 0-2% range.

The profitability of a market depends, in part, on a few things: (1) the maturity of a market (i.e. how much money competitors are “investing” to compete and gain share), (2) Uber’s competitive position within a market, (3) product mix (grocery, for example, is currently a money-losing offering; as is Route Share and Moto on the mobility side), and (4) for delivery, the level of ad monetization.

Here is commentary from a Mar-24 Morgan Stanley conference:

“So it’s a combination of, I’d say, the maturity of the market, competitive position in the market and then especially product mix. So there are a couple of markets on Delivery, where the grocery business is actually quite large compared to the online food delivery business. We’re still investing. We’re still in investment mode on the grocery business. On average, margins are negative in grocery. So in the markets where grocery has -- in some of these markets where grocery has very high penetration, the overall market can be negative. But again, as long as grocery margins move in the right direction, we think will mix into positive for those markets as well.

And then there are a couple of markets where, from a competitive standpoint, we’re not the #1 player yet, let’s say, in Delivery. And there are 3 players who were vying for the #1 position. And the fortunate position that we’re in is, because we’re #1 in a bunch of markets, we have some excess margins that we can reinvest in these markets to grow at outsized rates and hopefully get to the top category position.

So that, typically, is either product mix or its competitive position that we’re aiming for that account for the margins. But we’re quite — this is — it’s a pretty mature model at this point. And based on various take rates and based on product mix, we’re quite confident that we can get every single country that we operate in into EBITDA — solid EBITDA positive margins.”

Here is additional commentary from a 2017 NYT Dealbook conference:

Interviewer: “Let’s talk about the operational business itself. And part of an IPO I imagine — I don’t know if you get there by then — but how do you make this company profitable? There has been an argument made over the years given all the capital that’s come to you and so many of your competitors that we are all having our rides home and elsewhere subsidized by the venture capital community and that there may very well never be a day where the math actually adds up.”

DK: “That day is today because the math is actually working in certain areas and in certain geographies. So if you look at the portfolio of the business, there are certain markets such as the Asia Pacific markets — if you look at Southeast Asia or India where we are in heavy, heavy investment mode and appropriately so. And we lose money. The bigger the company gets, the more money we lose because we’re actually subsidizing those rides. But we have been able to demonstrate a track record — and you’ve got to look in the numbers and look in the geographies that where over a period of time we can pull back on the subsidies — and over a period of time get into a position of profitability on a geographic business. It doesn’t happen everywhere, but I think that we can certainly demonstrate it.

What’s the key and what’s the timeframe for that to happen? It depends on the market and it depends on the competitive dynamics in the marketplace. To some extent the larger the market, the longer you want to subsidize that market, because the ultimate target as far as the rides market or the delivery market is so big that you want to actually juice that business. So it depends. It also depends on the competitive nature of the business. The US is very, very competitive right now between us and Lyft, so I don’t see the US as being a particularly profitable market for the next six months. We’ll see what happens after six months. Depends on where the competition goes. Right now we have a situation where a competitor, Lyft, is spending very, very aggressively in order to gain share.”

Uber is still in “investment mode” across a number of its geos and products. Presumably, at least according to the chart above, if/when these markets/products “mature,” Uber still has a good amount of headroom to grow margins from this alone.

Here is the full Net Income to adjusted EBITDA (to non-GAAP operating income) bridge:

Beginning in Q1’26, Uber will no longer report adjusted EBITDA. Instead it will report the non-GAAP operating income metric above. This metric actually accounts for (i.e. subtracts) both depreciation and SBC (huzzah!).

Free Cash Flow

Uber generated $9.8bn of FCF in 2025, or 19% of revenue. This is up sharply from Uber’s FCF nadir of -$4.9bn in 2019.

Free cash flow, however, is not really the best metric with which to evaluate Uber’s profitability. This is due to Uber’s captive insurance program.

Insurers generally take in money upfront in the form of premiums before paying out claims at a later date. This phenomenon will distort an insurer’s FCF. For example, an insurer that aggressively underwrites a wave of bad policies can look very profitable for a stretch on a FCF basis. However, FCF will ultimately crater as claims on these policies eventually explode. As such, insurance companies are virtually never valued on a FCF basis.

Because Uber underwrites its own insurance, and because the business has been growing strongly, its FCF is being inflated. I believe the quantum of this inflation is roughly comparable to Uber’s growth in accrued insurance reserves. Over 2023-2025, growth in its accrued insurance reserves totaled $2.2bn, $2.8bn and $2.7bn, respectively.

Management will reference a “$10bn in FCF” metric often, but this is a little disingenuous. It doesn’t account for $1.8bn in SBC (that can be forgiven, I suppose). But it also includes growth in accrued insurance reserves of ~$2.7bn, which I believe should be backed out.

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Mobility

Key Priorities

Build AV Supply

The introduction of AVs create risk for Uber. In time, self-driving cars will undercut the cost of traditional ridesharing. If Uber is not leading this transition (or a fast follower), they will be at risk.

The quicker Uber’s AV partners can get to L4, and the quicker Uber can add cheap AVs to its platform, the better. Uber is having to use its balance sheet to drive AVs forward at this stage in their development. As discussed above, this seems like the right strategic decision. This does mean, however, that Uber’s business will be getting more capital intensive for at least some period of time.

Uber’s goal is to be the largest purveyor of driverless rides by 2029.

Build Everything Else AVs Will Need

Just getting access to AVs may not be even half the battle, however. As discussed previously, there’s a lot more that is needed to operate a successful AV program (namely AV infrastructure, fleet operations, and a slew of other items).

Uber’s answer to the “slew of other items” is its Autonomous Solutions offering, introduced in Feb-26. Uber breaks down is Autonomous Solutions offering into three buckets: (1) Infrastructure Solutions, (2) User Experience Solutions and (3) Fleet Management Solutions. Within each bucket, Uber offers a handful of capabilities.

Here are the descriptions of each capability from a recent PR:

Infrastructure Solutions

• AV2.0 Training Data. “Uber’s data-collection fleet includes thousands of specially-equipped vehicles across dozens of cities, which has captured millions of diverse miles of easily searchable multi-sensor data across the US and Europe. Working closely with engineers from Uber AV Labs, and building on partnerships like our Data Factory with NVIDIA, we’re helping our AV partners train their models and scale toward Level 4 autonomy much faster.”

• Data-Enriched Mapping. “Informed by tens of billions of trips worldwide and our own in-house mapping solutions, Uber’s dynamic geospatial data help AV partners refine pickups, routing, and ETAs with real-world precision, whether that’s avoiding specific intersections during rush hour or mitigating fleet-wide risks from weather and sudden road closures. Custom APIs help ensure AVs are always in the right places at the right time, even as Operational Design Domains evolve, continually driving both better utilization and a superior rider experience.”

• Complex Venue and Event Management. “With millions of trips completed at airports, stadiums, and event venues, Uber has developed unique data on the complexity of these high-traffic environments and how to ensure a good experience for riders. We are also leveraging existing relationships to work directly with high-traffic venues, like Q2 Stadium in Austin, to optimize venues appropriately for both human- and AV-driven rideshare.”

• Fleet Financing. “Our scale and predictable demand support new models for AV asset financing, helping partners bring more vehicles and new autonomous form factors to the road faster.”

• Regulatory Compliance Services. “Uber’s global policy and regulatory support teams have deep experience and trusted relationships to help bring new technology to markets all over the world, which will be crucial for the commercialization of autonomous technology.”

User Experience Solutions

• In-Car Experience. “Drawing from our best-in-class product design, Uber has developed an in-car AV-first software interface that puts riders in control, with seamless access to sound, temperature, and rider assistance. Designed to work across different hardware configurations and deployments, this unified experience creates a consistent user experience for riders. Launching later this year, the Nuro-Lucid-Uber robotaxi will be the first AV to bring this experience to its in-car tablets, seamlessly integrating Nuro’s real-time driving visualization.”

• Complex Use Cases / Shared & Reserved Rides. “Preparing autonomy for real-world demand will require a diversified product offering. Building on our experience with UberX Share and Uber Reserve, we’re helping autonomous partners develop new products that provide the reliability riders expect, offering the demand density, flexible supply, and regulatory support necessary to make these products possible. We already offer AVs through Uber Reserve in Phoenix, and were the first to announce a shared AV product with Volkswagen, launching later this year in Los Angeles.”

• End-to-End Support. “Uber’s customer support network is built into every stage of the journey. From pre-trip to post-trip, riders can access real-time help with the tap of a button, powered by the same infrastructure that supports more than a billion trips each month worldwide.”

Fleet Management Solutions

• Remote Assistance. “In a perfect world, AVs would never need help. In the real world, Uber provides real-time, on-road support for riders when AVs encounter issues, monitoring situations and providing live communication to the rider and the ADS itself. Additionally, we are designing a new remote assistance platform, built on top of our end-to-end support capabilities, and powered through a custom agent console that provides the operator with everything they need to understand the AV’s status and take action.”

• Field Support Operations. “Live today in multiple markets, our field support teams manage in-field issues, like lost items, towing, manual assistance, cleaning, or alternate rides to keep every trip moving–all visible through AV Mission Control. Where appropriate, we’ll also leverage our hybrid network, whether that’s returning a lost item through a courier, or seamlessly dispatching a human driver during inclement weather.”

• AV Mission Control. “Uber designed and built a comprehensive fleet intelligence and management solution that gives operators a real-time view of every vehicle, turning dozens of per-AV status indicators into system-level insight that keeps fleets efficient, connected, and ready to move. The system’s supply-state machine constantly ingests raw telemetry and signals from the AV fleet, determining a vehicle’s precise status, then uses an intelligent orchestration layer to help tee up possible actions or human interventions. This process is governed by a command authority system that strictly arbitrates who can issue commands, while providing a complete supply-history ledger for auditability.”

• AV Insurance. “Uber’s industry-first insurance program is built for the realities of autonomous operations. All aspects of an AV deployment require bespoke coverage, whether the vehicle is on-trip, off-trip, or charging at a depot. Uber’s Autonomous Vehicle Insurance Policy brings together protection for manufacturers, ADS providers, owners, fleet managers, and other supporting participants into one simple policy that is backed by several of the largest names in the insurance industry.”

Some of these capabilities seem like simply a re-packaging of current capabilities, like “complex venue and event management.” However, many of these are highly important (e.g. field support, data-enriched mapping, AV mission control, AV insurance, remote assistance, in-car experience), and capabilities that a 1P operator would need to develop if they were to try to sidestep Uber or another rideshare operator. Uber is able to build these things once, and then all AV players can benefit. There is no need for each to “reinvent the wheel.”

Note that Autonomous Solutions omits two critical elements to running an AV fleet: (1) fleet operations and (2) physical infrastructure (charging and depots).

For fleet operations, Uber will rely on a network of boots-on-the-ground “fleet operator” partners across the globe. Luckily for Uber, many of these partners already exist, just in a slightly different form. Many Uber drivers today are actually employed by fleet managers (Uber works with 50k+ fleet managers who represent ~20% of mobility bookings), who provide the cars and do all the behind-the-scenes work (repairs, cleaning, etc.) to maximize vehicle uptime.

Here is some commentary from the company’s Q4’24 supplemental which highlights the company’s fleet operations relationships and know-how:

“Fourth, successful commercialization requires scaled, efficient on-the-ground operations, something that sits squarely within Uber’s domain of expertise. It is important to note that an average-utilized AV can run as much as 100K miles a year, compared to a typical consumer vehicle at 10-15K miles a year. This means that AVs need to be charged multiple times a day and serviced monthly. AVs will also require consistent cleaning and available parking, all of which Uber is uniquely equipped to manage. Uber also has 15 years of experience to support a host of other key operational issues like fare disputes, lost item returns, stranded vehicle rescue, and insurance claim resolution.

Uber can deliver the lowest operational costs for our AV partners because we are leaps and bounds ahead on every aspect of the go-to-market capabilities that are critical to commercialization. For example, we partner with more than 50,000 fleet operators that together manage more than a half a million vehicles on our network globally, accounting for nearly 20% of our Mobility Gross Bookings. We also have a highly optimized cost structure that has been honed over the 12 billion annualized trips now happening on Uber. Our AV partners get to plug into that cost structure instantly—with advanced capabilities in customer acquisition, customer support, and the underlying technology and payments stack. Put simply, we are the player with the scale and expertise to run AV operations at the highest efficiency, period.”

Here is Uber COO Andrew Macdonald from a Feb-26 The Compound podcast:

“I also think the physical world deployment is more challenging than people understand. The long tail to launching a new city might not actually be the the L4 software. It may not actually even be the hardware. It may be the amount of power you need to stand up a depot that can house 400 cars at the right location in a new city. And so Uber, taking our existing fleet network — because we have dozens of [them] that operate dozens of large scale fleets that operate on our core business today — and deploying those folks to own and manage assets on behalf of our AV deployments, I think is also really powerful and not well understood. And then there’s a whole host of other things. You think about customer support, payments, identity, risk, all these core capabilities that we can extend to our partners to make their deployments successful — I don’t think is well understood.”

These fleet partner relationships won’t necessarily be exclusive to Uber. However, Uber having a large rolodex of them and the know-how of partnering with them at scale is likely a nice advantage in these initial stages of AV fleet rollouts. I imagine it’s very attractive to say, Lucid/Nuro, that Uber can help you deploy across the globe with various partners all at once, while simultaneously using Uber’s size/leverage to perhaps negotiate more attractive terms than you would have enjoyed otherwise. Uber is also already fluent at helping these operators finance their vehicles, should they opt to own captive fleets (which they already do today, just the non-AV kind).

On infrastructure (charging and depots), it seems increasingly the case that Uber is going to step in to provide it where necessary. This is a capability that sophisticated fleet operators can and do bring. But it seems Uber is again willing to use its balance sheet to push things forward and fill in the gaps. From a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference:

“From our perspective, when we think through this deployment curve over the next few years, once we start getting conviction that software is going to hit the mark and it’s going to get to that L4 deployment with superhuman safety, our efforts start shifting to a couple of other priorities.

The first one is securing OEM supply, right? We need to ensure that any of our partners who can deliver that kind of software have enough scale volumes coming to them, and then that volume can get deployed on Uber’s network.

And then the other thing we have to do is to ensure that we are bringing AV infrastructure on the ground. And for instance, for our 2027 deployments, we’re already scouting sites across our footprint. We already have about 50 different sites that we are beginning to get into leasing conversations, and those deployments will start once we have the software there.”

The fact that Uber is in talks with 50 different sites (50?!) for 2027 deployments seems to indicate that Uber is not far behind Waymo (perhaps ahead even) when it comes to a global AV infrastructure rollout.

Perhaps underrated as well is that Uber already operates all over the world. This means Uber already has “boots on the ground” that are familiar with these geos that can help liaise with fleet operators, help from a regulatory standpoint, help secure depots/charging infrastructure, etc. And nobody knows better than Uber (given its decade+ worth of data) where to put depots in all these cities across the world to maximize utilization.

Penetrate the Suburbs

Uber’s mobility business has been relatively slow to target/penetrate the suburbs. It makes sense — in the suburbs, more people have their own cars, parking is much easier to come by, there’s less nightlife per capita, and it’s less dense so it’s harder to avoid “deadheading” as a driver.

Uber has over time, however, developed products that have helped crack open the suburban market.⁴³ One example is Uber Reserve, which allows riders to reserve a time at which an Uber is guaranteed to be at a pick-up location. This helps alleviate the issue of long ETAs that plagues less dense markets, and better unlocks use-cases like the airport trip (though it costs riders more). Another product, Wait & Save, is basically the opposite of Reserve. It allows riders to wait longer for a ride but get a better rate. This helps more cost-conscious riders somewhat mitigate the higher cost of suburban rides. Another product is Uber Teens, designed for teenagers aged 13 to 17. Uber Teens allows teens to request their own rides (and order food via Uber Eats), but with a suite of safety features and parental oversight.

Here is Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy commenting on Uber’s momentum in mobility in the suburbs from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference:

Analyst: “Let’s come back to the core in the U.S. because there’s — the overall business is being run really well. And one of the shining points has been the dense — the less dense or the more sparsely populated market. I think you’ve talked about them growing 1.5x faster than the denser market. Maybe walk us through what has driven that faster growth. And how do you think about sort of investing to keep that more sparse market growth moving quicker through the overall P&L?”

Balaji Krishnamurthy (CFO): “Yes. So what I would say there is that it has been a function of our product innovation as well over the years, right? Historically, the reason we’ve not been able to serve sparser markets is that reliability in those markets is much worse. And over the years, we were able to address the reliability challenge on 2 dimensions. First, we introduced Reserve which, as a consumer, allows you to trade for reliability in exchange for price.

Reserve is more premium, you pay a price and get the reliability that brings you. And then, at the same time, we were also able to launch and expand a product like Wait & Save, which gives you the opposite choice. You get reliability in exchange for time, right? You’re making a trade-off on the time dimension versus price. So as we’ve done that -- and we have gotten better about things like taxi integrations because, historically, again, we didn’t have the 3P integration available.

In many markets, taxi is the best way to go into expansion. All of that has allowed us to go into these sparser markets and serve consumer needs in a way we couldn’t earlier. So what we’re beginning to see now is, today, when you think about the disclosure we gave on earnings where trips happening within our top 20 markets in the U.S. represent about 30% of our gross bookings but only 25% of U.S. mobility EBITDA, that just is a function of our non-top 20 markets growing faster, getting to a profitability position that’s better than our top 20 markets and continuing to grow from there, right?

It’s not at mature state margins either. And the further out you go on that density quartile, the better that story becomes for us, and we feel that the runway here is very, very long. And this is not just a U.S. story. We see similar sort of themes in Europe and markets like LatAm as well, where we are expanding with our Moto product, which is today 15% of first trips in Brazil and 90% of these Moto consumers migrate from Moto to UberX and other Uber products, which are quite profitable for us as well. So lots of runway with the product and geographical expansion we are driving here.”

Another interesting aspect of Uber’s suburban expansion is that these markets, counterintuitively, generate higher margins for Uber. From the Q1’26 prepared remarks:

“We also made solid progress expanding into suburban markets, with YoY trip growth in lower density geographies growing faster than the overall business with higher margins, contributing to our record segment operating income margin of 7.7%.”

The suburbs represent a very large, relatively under-penetrated market for Uber. The success Uber is having penetrating them, and doing so in a nicely profitable way, is a great development. Further, if Uber can win more customers in mobility in the suburbs, this should help them better penetrate the delivery opportunity in the suburbs as well (as the Uber One program would have greater appeal).

Drive Affordability

Key to driving sustainable growth for Uber is driving down prices. Uber has come at this from a few different angles in recent years.

One has been the Uber One program. Uber One materially reduces price on the delivery side, but also does so on the mobility side. As mentioned, Uber recently doubled down on the Uber One program by extending it across families and offering a discount for college-aged kids.

Another has been driving down the cost of commercial insurance. Commercial insurance costs exploded over the 2021-2024 period. Uber has helped cull prices by incentivizing safer driving and through investing in regulatory relief. Here is management from a Dec-25 UBS conference, discussing their regulatory relief efforts, specifically around reducing the size of their mandatory policy coverages:

“On the policy side, we have been working with a number of state situations to improve the equality of -- and the fairness really of the circumstances in various states on how Uber has to -- what levels of insurance Uber has to provide. California is probably one that many of you have heard about more recently. We used to have to carry $1 million of liability for uninsured and underinsured, whereas the car next to us would only have to carry a liability of $300,000. That delta ended up building a cottage industry of folks who were looking for Uber as a source of torque and legal claims. I mean, it really — we became their TAM. And by readjusting that down, we know that the amount of fraudulent use of the legal system in a number of states, California, we’ve done some reforms in Georgia, Nevada, et cetera, are also starting to give us benefit. And the last is, overall, the cost of insurance industry-wide in the U.S. has also started to moderate. So that’s now down to sort of mid-single digits from when I started at Uber, it was — I think it was in the low 20s.”

According to Uber, because it was required to maintain coverage of $1mm for uninsured and underinsured motorists in California, it became a “cottage industry” to extract awards from both Uber and Lyft (taxi companies were only required to carry a $300,000 policy).⁴⁴ Uber and Lyft successfully reduced their mandatory coverage in California from $1,000,000 per incident to $300,000 per incident (and $60,000 per person) through SB 371, signed into CA law in Oct-25 (effective Jan-26).

Lastly, Uber has introduced new products to help lower prices, including:

• Route Share. Offers pickups every 20 minutes along busy corridors during weekday commute hours. Fares are up to 50% cheaper than the cost of an UberX

• Ride Passes. For $2.99 per month, a rider can lock in a price for a specified route during a specified 1-hr window (avoids high fares due to weather, traffic, etc.). This is a product designed for routine commutes. Riders can also prepay for 5, 10, 15 or 20 rides to unlock even greater discounts

• Moto. Moto, or two-wheelers, is an increasing component of Uber’s offering in certain developing countries like Brazil and India. Moto now represents 15% of all first-time trips in Brazil.⁴⁵

Here is Dara discussing the Route Share product at its introduction at the 2025 Go-Get event:

“Building out a true low-cost product, shared product, getting 2 or 3 people into a car is a very significant challenge in -- operationally, algorithmically. We’re making progress there. So I’m happy about the progress there, but this is -- I think we will be possibly the only company in the world that’s going to solve this at scale. To be clear, we’re losing money in share, but the loss rates are coming down. The efficiencies continue to increase, and I’m quite confident of the activity of that team.”

The granddaddy of them all, however, will be AVs. AVs will drive a sustained, decade-long+ reduction in pricing.

Strengthen the Product Suite

Uber’s expanded product suite is clearly something that’s moving the needle. The aforementioned “Wait & Save,” “Reserve” and “Uber Teens” products are examples.

One especially key “product” for Uber, which Uber detailed in its Q1’26 prepared remarks, is “Uber for Business” (or U4B). The product-market fit here seems quite strong. Businesses of all flavors have all kinds of mobility and delivery needs. On the delivery side, providing lunch for employees would be a common use-case. On the mobility side, of course, there is business travel. And nobody can provide travel options in more places (and with both value and premium offerings). U4B is a $5bn business today in terms of annualized bookings, serving 300k+ organizations. It is “high margin” per the Q1’26 prepared remarks. And it is growing 45% YoY. Uber is targeting $10bn in gross bookings (and 1mm business customers) by 2028. Like other loyalty programs, U4B allows employees to keep any Uber One credits generated from work trips for personal use.

TAM

Below is the US TAM sensitivity table from earlier showing the US rideshare market opportunity as a product of price per mile x rideshare market share (and assuming 3tn total miles traveled).

This compares to Uber’s current US mobility gross bookings of ~$40bn. Just eyeballing it, a market in the $400-600bn range (or a ~10x’ing of the market) over ~15 years seems possible.

What % Will AVs Actually Take?

Whether AVs take 10%, 20%, or 30%+ of the market, and over what time period, is obviously of huge importance.

A big deciding factor is likely the price per mile at which AVs ultimately asymptote. For example, if AVs land at half the cost per mile of personal car ownership, you could make a case for a much higher ultimate market share (perhaps even over 50%). If the price lands in a range that is around parity with personally owned cars, it becomes harder to handicap.

One set of projections I’ve seen is from Goldman Sachs from Jul-25, which pegged the timing of the crossover in the ~2036-2038 range, so call it a decade from now. In this example, it seems GS has the price of AVs dropping materially below personally-owned, but this particular post is light on details, so it’s hard to know how they arrived at these figures.

Below I’ve done my own back-of-the-envelope analysis. I analyze the cost per mile for robotaxis at a range of price points for the vehicle (from $150k down to $20k). I compare this to the cost per mile across a range of personally-owned vehicle types (new & used 4Runners, Corollas and Priuses). I also include a theoretical personally-owned AV Prius (i.e. one that can drive itself; I assume the hardware for this is in the ~$10k range).

When I do the math, I land in a zone where robotaxis and personally owned are around parity, even at low AV vehicle price points.

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Note that this analysis is laden with assumptions. The goal is to get a ballpark sense of the AV price at which AVs and personally-owned vehicles “crossover,” and how low the price of AVs could potentially get. This analysis assumes supporting infrastructure is well utilized (i.e. we’re hitting economies of scale on things like charging infrastructure). Note as well that my numbers don’t necessarily line up with the Goldman numbers above. Goldman’s current AV prices bake in high insurance rates, costs for “remote operators,” etc. I’m effectively fast-forwarding to a world where these costs are already at maturity (e.g. I don’t have any costs allocated for “remote operators;” I assume an insurance rate lower than today’s personal car insurance rates, etc.).

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Based on my rough figures below, as the cost of a robotaxi dips into ~$30k range, the cost per mile will be just about equivalent to that of a personally owned AV Prius (~68c per mile vs. ~63c per mile). However, the cost per mile of a $30k robotaxi will still be above that of a personally-owned non-AV Corolla or Prius (~68c per mile vs. ~55c per mile).

This analysis is based on a host of assumptions/estimates. Some that are worth calling out in particular:

• Life of the car. Taxis drive a lot more miles, in total, than the average personally owned car. EV taxis even more so. This is a big part of what makes the robotaxi math work. In this analysis I assume a new personally owned vehicle will last 200k miles, while an AV taxi will last 300-425k miles. Note that in years, this means the taxi is only lasting ~5 years (I assume 80k miles driven per year), while the personally-owned vehicle lasts ~16 years.

• Insurance costs. For the personally-owned insurance, I take this AAA estimate for annual costs ($1,715) divided by avg miles driven per year (of 12.5k) to get to 14c per mile. For the AV car, I assume a better rate per mile. I assume a better rate per mile because Waymos are already ~10x safer than the average human driver. The rate I use is not 10x better, however, as I assume the better safety is offset by more expensive repairs and by the fact that commercial insurance rates run higher than personal insurance. For the $50k AV, I assume a rate of 10c per mile.

• Fuel/electricity costs. For the Corolla, for instance, I assume $4.00 per gallon for gas and 35 MPG (which equates to 11c per mile). For the 4Runner I assume $4.00 per gallon and 23 MPG (or 17c per mile). For the AV I assume 8c per mile for electricity. While home powered electricity is supposedly only 4-6c per mile, fast charging is considerably more (~9-15c per mile). AV taxis will sometimes need to be rapidly charged multiple times per day. They also require more power than the average EV due to the additional compute/sensor hardware. That said, fleet AVs should enjoy electricity rates that are closer to wholesale, helping to offset the need for faster charging and higher electricity demand.

• Maintenance. For the personally-owned vehicles I use a 10c per mile estimate from AAA. I assume a slightly lower cost for the AVs due to EVs generally being much cheaper to maintain. Fleet AVs should also benefit from “wholesale” repair costs vs. personally-owned which are subject to a retail mark-ups. I assume the cheaper cost is somewhat offset by the addition of expensive sensor/compute components. In all I assume a cost of 8c per mile for the $50K AV.

• Parking. This is an area where dramatic swings can happen. If you live in the average suburban home, your parking is “free.” However, if you live in a luxury condo in a dense urban core, you might pay $350+ per month for parking. If you assume 12.5k miles driven per year, that equates to 35c+ per mile. For AVs I assume they are mostly parked in relatively low-cost depots. I assume an all-in rate for parking of ~$5 per day (~$150 per month), which translates to 2c per mile ($5 per day * 365 days / 80k miles per yr).

• Utilization Mark-Up. AVs are not always occupied, of course. In fact, it’s estimated that around ~40% of miles are “empty miles.” Thus, we need a mark-up on occupied miles to recoup to cost of these empty miles. In my analysis I assume the robotaxis travel 80k miles per year and that 50k of these miles are “revenue generating” (or 62.5% of total miles).

• 20% Rideshare Mark-Up. This represents Uber’s 20% take rate that they will layer on top of the rest of a robotaxi’s cost structure.

Dara actually makes the case in a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast that once AVs get into the $50-60k range, the AV becomes a “very, very compelling economic proposition.” He states that it will likely take “a couple generations” of cars to get there.

Interviewer: “Do you think that the AV thing is going to happen kind of like little by little then all at once or it will be incremental over some period of time?”

DK: “I think the way I’d put it is little by little by little and then all at once. In that if the vehicles are cheap enough and safe enough, then the economics of AV are spectacular. And not only will they be a huge opportunity for ridesharing as it exists, they will extend the TAM hugely of the overall mobility pie. But it’ll take hardware platforms that are both safe and cheap and we’re probably two generations away from that hardware platform right now.”

Interviewer: “What’s the bottleneck right now?”

DK: “The bottleneck right now is a lot of the sensors, compute and then the software are essentially intermingled. You don’t have industry set of APIs that are formulating. As the industry matures, standards are going to come into play. So for example, we announced an effort with NVIDIA where, you know, they are building the next generation AV stack with Hyperion. And they are building their own L4 software that they’re going to essentially offer to all vehicle operators. And we will bring the network, we’ll do data collection and then we’ll run fleet management as well. And then the OEMs can focus on manufacturing cars. And if you have a future where 10 years from now, every single new car sold comes at L4 ready and is $50, $60,000. That is a very, very compelling economic proposition. But you need a couple of generations of cars and compute’s probably there, but a couple of generations of cars to get there.”

The big hurdle, of course, in getting to a $50K AV is in the hardware costs (compute, sensors). Encouragingly, the cost of AV hardware has been falling rapidly.

From Q2’25 earnings:

“The real question for us is the cost of the vehicles, the cost of hardware coming down. And again, we’re seeing very encouraging trends there. LiDAR, which used to cost $20,000, $30,000 a pop, now solid-state LiDAR coming out of some of the Chinese manufacturers is costing $300, $400 per LiDAR as well. So the affordability of hardware is moving absolutely in the right direction.”

Here is Alex Kendall (Founder, CEO of Wayve) from a Nov-25 Training Data podcast:

“The industry has really, outside of Tesla, coalesced around a common architecture of a surround camera, surround radar, and a front-facing LiDAR stack. Now, this costs under $2,000. It’s automotive grade components, not the retrofit robotaxi components you see today. But having frontier GPU compute, automotive grade GPU on the car and that kind of sensor architecture is a really great platform to to build L3/L4 autonomy, eyes off or driverless. It gives you the necessary redundancy. It lets you deal with edge cases that — you know, cameras alone, I agree they can get you to human level but we want to go beyond human level — and so I think this kind of architecture is affordable, scalable, it’s got the supply chain for mass manufacturing and it can…drive superhuman levels of performance. So that’s what we’re seeing many manufacturers bring out on their vehicles and where we’re integrating our AI.”

Another hurdle is eliminating the “retrofit” costs of adding AV hardware to a vehicle after it has already been produced. The Jaguar I-Pace Waymos, for example, were retrofitted with all the necessary hardware for L4 autonomy. Increasingly (including for the Nuro/Lucid Gravity robotaxis), these components will be integrated into the vehicle during normal-course production (or “in-line” production). This will introduce additional cost savings.

If AVs Achieve Price Parity Only, What Market Share Can AVs Take?

In this case, whether you are a car owner or not may depend a good deal on where you live. If you don’t have kids and live in a dense urban core where you are paying 35c per mile for parking and it’s painful to drive around, the decision to go rideshare-only is more straightforward. If you have kids and live in the suburbs, you probably still own at least one car (for the car seat, the convenience of being able to keep stuff in the car, etc.).

Here is Gemini’s break down of where people live in the US based on population density:

Perhaps we assume 50% of the “urban core” miles are robotaxi, 25% of the “dense transit-adjacent,” 10% of the “auto-centric suburbs” and 0% of rural. This would equate to 15% of total miles being robotaxi.

If 15% of miles are robotaxi, and we assume a price per mile of $1.25, that equates to a ~$550bn market size (in US mobility alone).

How Much do AVs Cost Today?

Uber ballparked the cost of an all-in AV at around $200k in 2024.⁴⁶

In Feb-26, Waymo struck a deal with Hyundai that was rumored to be $2.5bn for 50k IONIQ 5 vehicles. That comes out to a price tag of $50k per vehicle. The IONIQ MSRPs in the range of $35k. So the assumption is that the additional $15k per vehicle was for all the necessary autonomy hardware. If this were the case, then we are actually almost at Dara’s $50K bogey today.

When Uber recently expanded its Nuro/Lucid partnership to include an additional 15k minimum order of Lucid’s new midsize vehicle, the PR quoted a price of “less than $50k” as a starting price for the vehicle. The way the PR is phrased, the $50k seems to exclude AV hardware costs. But if those are in the $15k range, then Uber would be looking at a ~$65k AV.

Further, as previously mentioned, Chinese-built AVs may already be well below $50k. BYD’s latest Seagull EV, equipped with LiDAR and a “mid-tier” smart driving system, retails for just ~$13,400. Baidu’s RT6 Robotaxi (manufactured by JMC) has supposedly carried a sub $30k price tag since May-24.

What ultimately gets a US-built AV to a sub $30k level might be innovation on form factor. For example, Tesla’s Cybercab, which it claims will retail for ~$30k, is stripped down and purpose-built for autonomy. It is a two-seater with no steering wheel, no mirrors, no pedals, a smaller battery, etc.

If I had to guess, if we exclude Chinese manufacturers, I’d say we are ~4-6 years away from AVs (with super human safety) coming off the line at a ~$30-40k price point. This would be in line with (perhaps slightly below) Dara’s estimate of “a couple generations away.”

Competitive Landscape

Waymo

Waymo was founded in 2009 as a “moonshot” experiment within Google’s X lab. The company was spun out in 2016, but is still majority owned by Google.

In Jan-26, the company closed a $16bn round of financing at a $126bn valuation. Investors in the round included Dragoneer, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz and Mubadala (Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund). Waymo was reportedly doing north of $350mm in annualized revenue at the time of the raise (in Waymo’s case, revenue and bookings are going to be equivalent).

Waymo launched its commercial service in Phoenix in 2020. In Aug-23, it launched in San Francisco, it’s second official commercial market. The company now operates in ~15 markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Nashville, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, and Miami. The company reportedly had a total ~3,000 vehicles in its fleet as of Mar-26.

Waymo’s vehicles are classified as level four autonomous. They don’t require a driver or active supervision. By all accounts, in terms of safety, they compare very favorably to human drivers. From the WSJ:

“Swiss Re, one of the world’s premier reinsurance companies, analyzed 25 million miles of Waymo driving. It concluded these vehicles are safer than human drivers, with 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% fewer property damage claims. A peer-reviewed study examined 56.7 million rider-only miles and found an 85% reduction in suspected serious injuries compared with human drivers and a 96% reduction in intersection crashes.”

These stats suggest Waymos are roughly 10x safer than the average human driver. Waymo’s Co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana, had the following to say at the Nov-25 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, suggesting Waymos were ~5x and ~12x safer when it came to accidents with other vehicles/property and with pedestrians, respectively:

“We’ve driven over 100 million RO [Remote Operations] miles, but we had a study at 96 million RO miles. And it’s actually been determined that the Waymo driver is five times safer than a human driver and 12 times safer than a human driver as it relates to pedestrians.”

Waymo is expanding quickly, growing its rides per week by 10x over the past 2 years. The pace of city expansions, in fact, has increased dramatically. Early markets took years to advance from initial mapping to on-road autonomous testing to a pilot with riders to a commercial launch. More recent city launches like Orlando have condensed this timeline to <1 year.

The company is targeting 1mm rides per week and to have ride-hailing operations in over 20 cities (including two international cities: Tokyo and London) by the end of 2026.

In Jun-26, Waymo introduced “Waymo Premier,” a subscription product priced at $29.99 per month. Waymo Premier allows riders to (1) access priority pickups, (2) earn 10% Waymo Cash back on all trips, (3) access new cities early, and (4) cancel up to five trips monthly for free.

As referenced previously, the Waymo service, at this point, is generally more expensive and ETAs are longer than traditional rideshare. The Waymo fleet is fixed and thus can’t “flex up” like Uber’s can to meet demand during peak hours. As a result, Waymo must choose whether to carry enough cars to meet peak-ish demand (and thus be forced to idle more cars during troughs), or whether to carry less cars to drive better utilization (knowing this will result in higher ETAs during peak hours). It appears Waymo has chosen the latter approach for now. It will likely continue to be challenging for Waymo to offer low ETAs during peak hours.

Waymo’s fleet is currently almost entirely Jaguar I-Pace’s. The company is in the process of introducing the Ojai from Chinese carmaker Zeekr (a subsidiary of Geely). The Ojai is a small minivan/SUV, and will include Waymo’s sixth-generation AV technology. The sixth-generation sensor array consists of 13 cameras, 4 LiDAR sensors and 6 radar sensors. This is a material reduction to the fifth-generation suite which consisted of 29 cameras, 5 LiDAR sensors and 6 radar sensors. According to this FT article, analysts pegged the cost of a Jaguar I-Pace at ~$150k each. Waymo announced in May-25 that it had received the last I-Pace that it would add to its fleet. In all, Waymo ended up taking delivery on ~3.5k I-Pace’s (vs. initial plans for as many as 20k). Waymo is also planning to outfit South Korea’s Hyundai IONIQ 5 SUV with its sixth-generation AV technology.

In mid-2025, Waymo opened a large, 239k sq ft production facility in Mesa, AZ in partnership with Magna International, an automotive supplier. The facility will be capable of upfitting “tens of thousands” of vehicles per year, and will reportedly handle both the Ojai and the upcoming IONIQ 5. In the case of the Ojai, most of the production is done in China (i.e. the platform, structural elements, powertrain). The Mesa facility takes this “glider” base vehicle and adds the autonomous outfitting and performs final assembly. While the Mesa plant does not represent pure “in-line” production (which would be the cheapest form of AV production), it constitutes a step in that direction.

While Waymo has shown nothing other than an accelerating roadmap in its 1P robotaxi service, when asked about their future business model, they do maintain that first and foremost, they are building a “generalizable driver.”

Here is their Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana from the Nov-25 TechCrunch Disrupt conference:

“Our business model is the same. We’re building a generalizable driver. That driver, through our ride-hailing service, is our first application. Then local delivery. Then long haul trucking. And then eventually we will license this technology to automotive companies for personally owned cars. That’s always been our road map, and it’s still our road map.”

She has reiterated this idea in multiple interviews. And Waymo actually has a partnership with DoorDash, delivering food in Phoenix.

Here is Sundar Pichai on a Jun-25 Lex Fridman podcast also emphasizing Waymo’s focus on the Driver tech (and its “generalizability”):

“We don’t compete with Tesla directly, we are not making cars, etc. We are building L4, L5 autonomy. We’re building a Waymo Driver which is general purpose and can be used in many settings. They’re obviously working on making Tesla self-driving too. I’ve just assumed it’s de facto that Elon will succeed in whatever he does. So like, you know, that is not something I question. So but I think we are so far from — these spaces are such vast spaces — like I think about transportation, the opportunity space, the Waymo Driver is a general purpose technology. We can apply in many situations. So you have a vast, green space. In all future scenarios, I see Tesla doing well and Waymo doing well.”

Here is Alex Immerman (a16z lead investor on Waymo) on a Mar-26 Sourcery podcast, with some slight hedging re whether Waymo will, in the end, choose to operate a fully blown rideshare service:

“I think where margins land over time is an interesting question. On one hand, Waymo could go the route that they are today and own and operate cities like in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They own the experience with Waymo One. They are managing the operations and the depots. As an alternative, they could outsource some of that as they are in Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin, where third parties like an Uber or a Moove are managing the operations. When you outsource that, and those are real costs, that could lead to a higher margin product. This is never going to be like high margin software, but it’ll be better than operating the fleet themselves.”

David Risher, the CEO of Lyft, has expressed some doubt around whether Waymo will ultimately want to build out a global robotaxi service. In his mind, as the leader in the space, Waymo is still in an experimentation phase. From a Nov-25 Decoder interview:

Interviewer: “Let me ask you about Waymo, and then I want to kind of zoom out again. You’re Waymo’s partner in Nashville. Waymo’s partnered with Uber in other markets. Waymo’s running their own service in some markets. It does feel — and you know, they’re obviously backed by Alphabet, they’ve been backed by Alphabet for a long time. They’re going to spend a lot of money to win. It just seems very obvious. If you asked Sundar about it, he is like, we’re just going to keep spending money because now it’s very clear that we’re close to winning. They’re going to spend a lot of money until they win. They’re looking for partners, right? They’re looking to see what winning looks like. You’re obviously — you’re in a kind of a weird competition, right? You’re in a weird kind of bake-off. You’re the partner in one market, they’re the partner in another market. They’ve got their own service. How do you perceive that competition? Have they told you what winning looks like?”

DR: “You know, I think they’re figuring it out. I really do. And I take them at their word that they... Look, I think a word that they use pretty often is ‘optionality,’ right? They have something pretty cool, right? They’ve got technology that works about as well as anyone’s in the world. You know, again, I think really only Baidu would be the real competition there. I think everybody else is some, you know, degree off of where they are. And it works and it works well and people like it. So that’s a good place to be. Thus, if you’re in that position and you think, ‘Well, gosh, I’m not really sure how this is all gonna play out,’ a totally reasonable strategy is, well, let’s try a little bit of everything, right? Let’s try doing it ourselves end-to-end, let’s try partnering in a certain way with one company, let’s try partnering in a different way with another company, and we’ll kind of see.

When I fast forward, I think a very likely outcome is they will realize, ‘Gosh,’ as I just said, ‘Running a rideshare business is quite expensive and it’s very physical.’ It involves, like, again, think of the scale, 800 million rides we do every single year, 50 million riders. You know, 1 1/2 million drivers — I know those aren’t part of the picture, but someone’s got to own those cars. There’s gonna be someone else in this picture who’s owning these things and wants these things utilized. You know, if you’re Google, do you want customer service? Do you want all these different things that you have to do to operate that service? Maybe you don’t mind it in a couple of markets — maybe it’s kind of cool, you can have direct access to your customers and you can do sort brand building and maybe get some data from it, whatever. All good. But do you really wanna do it in 280 cities around the United States or all around the world? I don’t know. So I think a very likely outcome is they will be, you know, frenemies, right? Or what’s that word, co-opetition or whatever. Like they’ll compete in some markets and in others they’ll partner. And our job is to be the best partner they can possibly have so that they, over time, give us more of their business and stay focused in their own way in some small number of markets.”

If Waymo were to only license a generalizable driver, could they still grow into their $126bn valuation? Perhaps they are locked into “going for it” as a byproduct of their valuation?

Based on some back-of-the-envelope math, it seems reasonable to think Waymo could grow into its valuation with just a generalizable driver. There are about 100mm passenger cars + light commercial vehicles sold annually around the world. If you assume AV tech can be licensed to all of them (a stretch over the near term, of course) for $2,500 per car, that would equate to a $250bn market. If Waymo could take 10% of that, you’d be looking at $25bn in revenue. That would generally support its current valuation (though it’s also a long ways off).

However, it’s also a good bet that smaller, on-demand delivery vehicles will also proliferate over this timeframe. That might unlock another tranche of vehicles into which Waymo could sell AV tech. Long-haul trucking is another clear opportunity. Robots, or even drones, could be other opportunities for Waymo (though different from driving, they are areas where Waymo’s “world models” could be leveraged).

Alex Immerman suggested on the Sourcery podcast that a16z, at least, views the future of AV software as most likely a “productive oligopoly”:

Interviewer: “From a deal perspective, I want to unpack the process. How do you underwrite a company like this? Do you look at Tesla?”

AI: “So this is one where you have to think about a variety of scenarios off into the future. So to make it simple, I would frame it as there are three like base scenarios. The first is Waymo stays the only game in town. I certainly, like, hope that is the case. They have dominant market share of a market that grows quite significantly.

The second case is the market still grows significantly because it’s such a great value proposition — self-driving. However, there are multiple players. That might be a Tesla, it could be a Zoox, it could be a Wayve. There are Chinese players as well. But because of the technical challenges, I think it’s a productive oligopoly.

And then the third scenario is where things don’t work out as well for Waymo and, you know, maybe there’s impairment. Maybe one of those other providers has an advantage over them in the fullness of time.

I think the most likely scenario of those is that it is a productive oligopoly. That there are many players but we expect Waymo to be a meaningful share of that overall market.”

Reading between the lines, this would seem to suggest that a16z also believes that just Waymo’s generalizable driver tech could eventually support its current valuation.

Tesla

Tesla is a number of things these days. It’s of course an automaker that builds EVs. Its bestsellers are the Model 3 (sedan) and the Model Y (SUV), which together dominate EV sales in the US.

Tesla also sells a Class 8 electric truck called “The Semi.” The company runs Tesla Energy, which builds the Powerwall and Megapack batteries, and installs solar roofs. It is building the Optimus humanoid robot. They operate huge AI training clusters (for their self-driving efforts and training the Optimus). Tesla is even building its own semiconductor “fab,” or fabrication plant, in partnership with SpaceX and xAI that it has dubbed “Terafab.” The Terafab will cost an estimated $20-25bn and build Tesla’s fifth generation AI chip, with volume production targeted for 2027, in theory.

In 2025, the company sold ~1.6mm vehicles and generated $95bn in revenue. It ended 2025 with $44bn of cash on the balance sheet and $8bn of debt.

For our purposes, we will focus on Tesla’s efforts in self-driving and its Robotaxi initiative. Tesla has been working on self-driving tech since 2013. In 2014, Tesla began installing a single camera and radar system (developed by Mobileye) on its Model S. In 2015, Tesla launched “Autopilot,” which allowed cars to steer themselves on highways, a first of its kind “L2” system. In 2016, Tesla moved to Hardware 2 (HW2) which included the use of NVIDIA chips. In Oct-16, management famously promised that every car produced from that day forward had all the necessary hardware for full autonomous driving. In 2019, Tesla moved to a custom chip designed specifically for neural networks. In 2023, Tesla moved to “Version 12” of its self-driving software (which it used to refer to as FSD, for “Full Self Driving” — now it’s “Full Self Driving (Supervised)”). This was a step-change event, as it replaced hundreds of thousands of lines of human-written code with an end-to-end neural network.

In Oct-24, as Tesla started to approach L4 autonomy, it unveiled its “Cybercab.” The Cybercab is a purpose-built “robotaxi.” It has no steering wheel, pedals, or side mirrors. It also has no NACS charging port. Instead it’s charged “inductively” by parking over a charging pad. It has a relatively small 35 kWh battery that is optimized for city driving, and carries just ~200 miles of range. The Cybercab’s sensor suite is estimated to cost roughly $400. While Tesla will own its initial fleet of Cybercabs itself, they claim that third parties will be able to buy them starting in late 2026 for “under $30k.”

In Apr-26, the Cybercab officially went into mass production at Tesla’s new “Giga Texas” facility. Giga Texas is unique in that it employs an “unboxed” process. Instead of using a traditional linear assembly line, the car is built in separate “sub-modules” (the floor, the sides, the roof) which are then “snapped together” at the end. This has supposedly reduced the factory footprint by 40%. Giga Texas also has no paint shop. The Cybercab uses colored polyurethane body panels, where the color is “molded in.” The paint shop is typically one of the (if not the) most expensive and time-consuming parts of the car manufacturing process. Musk has said that Tesla intends to ultimately manufacture two million Cybercabs annually.

Tesla’s Robotaxi operation went live in Austin and the SF Bay Area in Jun-25 and Jul-25, respectively. It added Dallas and Houston in Apr-26, and Miami in Jul-26.

According to Morgan Stanley research, Tesla’s Cybercab should already be in the ~$0.74 cost per mile range vs. Waymo in the ~$1.36 range, and rideshare in the ~$1.71 range. Personal car ownership, according to Morgan Stanley, is in the $0.71 range.

While the Robotaxi operation is “live,” it lags majorly behind Waymo in a number of different ways.

For starters, the vast majority of the cars in the fleet are supervised — there is a safety driver sitting in the driver’s seat ready to take over if the car encounters issues. Waymo has no safety drivers. Neither does Zoox, Avride, WeRide, etc.

Secondly, the Robotaxi fleet seems to be having a lot of incidents, based on the anecdotal evidence as well as reported crash figures. Anecdotally, you have stories like this one:

TexasTSLA@TexasTSLA

Welcome to Dallas bud 😅😅🤣 Dear @Tesla FSD users have said multiple times nav and map data is 🥔 and needs to be improved @robotaxi misses its exit! ROBOTAXI DRIVES ON THE HIGHWAY and freaks out!! THEN TRIES TO PULL OVER AS TRAFFIC IS FLYING BY 80-90mph!!! Rider

1:37 AM · Apr 19, 2026 · 592K Views

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257 Replies · 177 Reposts · 2.22K Likes

I covered this previously — it’s a lot of issues for one trip. Here is a ride from Houston where the Robotaxi doesn’t make its exit (unclear why) and has to circle back 3 times (while performing 2 illegal U-turns). Someone actually compiled a whole list of incidents at one point.

In terms of the accident data, it’s hard to calculate exactly how frequently Tesla’s Robotaxis are crashing. From Jul-25 (when Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet began operating in Austin) through mid Mar-26, Tesla reported 18 crashes to the NHTSA, all in Austin. You can see the data here, under “ADS Incident Report Data.” The problem is we don’t know the number of miles driven by the corresponding Robotaxi fleet. This would give us the incident rate (or accident per miles driven).

We do have this chart from the company’s Q1’26 earnings deck, showing us Tesla’s cumulative paid Robotaxi miles:

However, these figures likely include miles driven in the SF Bay Area (where Tesla’s been operating a commercial service since Sep-25). As mentioned above, there are zero accidents reported in the SF Bay Area (or anywhere other than Austin), so I’d guess the SF Bay Area accidents are not required to be reported (perhaps because in the SF Bay Area, the fleet operates under a limo/private charter permit and always carries a safety driver — thus it’s more of a chauffeured service).

Furthermore, the Robotaxi fleet in the SF Bay Area is actually much larger than the fleet in Austin according to Robotaxi Tracker. It seems the active fleet in the Bay Area has been something like ~4x larger than Austin’s on average since it launched. If we conservatively assume the miles traveled in Austin is 25% of the total cumulative miles (implying only 3x the number of cars in the Bay Area), that would mean ~375k miles were traveled in Austin. That would imply an incident rate of 18 / 375k miles or 1 incident per ~21k miles. If we assume that there were simply no crashes in the Bay Area, or that these cumulative miles are only Austin miles, then the incident rate would be 18 / 1.5mm miles or 1 incident every 83k miles.

In comparison, according to the NHTSA, the average human driver has 1 (police-reported) crash every 500k miles. Because this figure is based on police-reported crashes, the actual incident rate will be higher. Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims the average driver has a minor collision every 222k miles and a major collision every 660k miles:

Thus, it seems at best the Tesla Robotaxi is ~3x worse than the average human driver (1 incident every ~83k miles vs. 1 incident every ~222k miles). More likely, however, is that Tesla’s Robotaxi is more like ~10x worse (1 incident every ~21k miles vs. 1 incident every ~222k miles).

Making this even worse is the fact that the vast majority of Robotaxi trips to date have been supervised (i.e. there have been safety drivers behind the wheel). Thus, we can only assume that incident rates would have been even worse — perhaps much worse — if these cars had actually been fully autonomous.

This says nothing of:

1. Robotaxi reportedly features a “hidden backbone of teleoperators who can pilot the vehicles remotely when needed.” “Remoting in” to drive a vehicle is considered highly unsafe. Waymo and others are very clear that while customer support can be reached to help with certain things, they never drive the car remotely. Driving the car remotely is highly dangerous due to latency issues and potential gaps in cellular service.

2. Existing Teslas, which Musk claims can be added to the Robotaxi fleet with the touch of a button, may not have the necessary redundancies to be AVs at all. To be an L4 AV, a vehicle needs overlapping sensors, more than one power source, redundant braking and steering, and two compute stacks. Thus, if any of these “points of failure” fail, the car can still drive (and safely pull over). According to this article, Tesla’s Models S, X, Y and 3 may not have this type of redundancy: “Because Tesla is Tesla, it doesn’t share a lot of information about what’s underneath the skin of its vehicles. Independent reporting and teardowns have turned up some information about redundant systems. The full steer-by-wire system used on the Cybertruck features redundant power and controls, with two motors incorporated into the steering rack, likely fed by separate power sources. It’s a good bet that a similar system is used on the controls-free Cybercab that Tesla plans to deploy as part of its Robotaxi service. Note that redundancy like this is not present on the Models S, X, Y or 3 that came before the Cybertruck. And without such backups, many of the Full Self-Driving promises simply could not have been fulfilled safely.”

3. In order to sell the Cybercab, Tesla needs approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA), as the Cybercab lacks a steering wheel, pedals and side mirrors (i.e. the Cybercab is not compliant with NHSTA regulations). NHTSA grants exemptions to automakers to sell vehicles not fully in compliance, but caps these sales at 2,500 per year. According to the WSJ, NHSTA indicated that as of Mar-26, Tesla hasn’t yet applied for an exemption on the Cybercab.

4. Elon’s long list of false promises re self-driving

Tesla’s “Achilles heel” when it comes to self-driving may be its insistence on a camera-only sensor suite. The Robotaxi and the latest Model 3s / Model Ys come equipped with 8 cameras, but no radar or LiDAR. Elon’s view seems to be that because humans drive with their eyes only, a machine with 8 cameras and a neural net should be able to drive just as well, if not much better. The problem with this, as discussed earlier, is that (1) we don’t know how long it will take to get this to work and (2) this doesn’t seem like a recipe for “superhuman” safety and could result in a substantially less safe product than Waymo and others.

Here is Dara from a Mar-26 HD in HD podcast:

DK: “I think Tesla is — they have gotten the hardware bill of materials to an industry-leading level in the US. The Chinese OEMs can match it and then some. But in the US, in terms of bill of materials, Tesla’s a leader. What they haven’t yet proven is that a camera only system can be safe enough as it relates to AV. And you know time will tell on that one.”

Interviewer: “Why do you think that that’s the hill Elon dies on?”

DK: “I think that he thinks from a first principals standpoint and fact is human drivers have two eyes and they can drive. So why can’t a car which is a computer with wheels and that has eight eyes, do the same? Now, eventually that sounds right. But the question is over the next 5 years, over the next 10 years as AV is developing, are they going to get there quick enough? I think the other thing that probably has taken some folks by surprise is that the cost of LiDAR and radar — the cost for LiDAR has come from like $40,000 down to a couple hundred. So the hardware curves have come down probably faster than the industry expected.”

Interviewer: “So why not just add a LiDAR there?…”

DK: “Yeah, I can’t speak for him. I mean, the one thing I would say is Tesla is economically motivated to make L3 plus or L4 work for the fleet that they already have on the ground. So, that could be a factor.”

As mentioned above, in Oct-16 Tesla began promising that all of its cars manufactured with HW2 had all the hardware necessary to achieve L4 autonomy. Tesla would eventually have to walk that back. Then, more recently, in Q1’26, it had to walk back that cars manufactured with HW3 would be able to achieve L4 autonomy. On the earnings call, management floated the idea of setting up “micro factories” around the world that could swap HW3 with HW4.

“Unfortunately, Hardware 3 -- I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD. We did think at one point it would have that, but relative to Hardware 4, it has only 1/8 of the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4. And memory bandwidth is one of the key elements needed for unsupervised FSD. It’s just generally a thing that’s needed for AI. If you’re doing an autoregressive transformer, memory bandwidth is the choke point.

So for customers that have bought FSD, what we’re offering is essentially a trade-in -- like a discounted trade-in for cars that have AI4 hardware, and we’ll also be offering the ability to upgrade the car, to replace the computer. And you also need to replace the cameras, unfortunately, to go to Hardware 4.

So to do this efficiently, we’re going to have to set up like kind of micro factories or small factories in major metropolitan areas in order to do it efficiently. Because if it’s done just at the service center, it is extremely slow to do so and inefficient. So we basically need like many production lines to make the change. And I do think, over time, it’s going to make sense for us to convert all Hardware 3 cars to Hardware 4 because that’s what enables them to enter the Robotaxi fleet and have unsupervised FSD.”

If Tesla ultimately admits that they cannot achieve L4 without radar/LiDAR, then Tesla would have to somehow remedy this, which could be quite painful. Thus Tesla has boxed itself in, to a degree, to making L4 work with a camera-only sensor suite.

This clip from Rivian’s autonomy day does a nice job of explaining the power of a “multi-modal” sensor suite that includes cameras, radar and LiDAR. While the cameras are undoubtedly the workhorse sensors for autonomy, they struggle in “non-ideal” lighting conditions such as low light, excessive light and fog. In such cases, radar and LiDAR can help fill in the gaps. Radar and LiDAR also provide richer, more accurate data around the depth and velocity of objects that surround the car.

The video below of a Tesla hitting a deer while in FSD mode shows how challenging it may be to achieve self-driving with cameras only (this is from Oct-24 granted, so it’s “dated”). It’s dark, the deer is only visible for a few seconds before impact (with the car on the highway, and accelerating, it would’ve been impossible to avoid impact at all, even for a human driver), it’s mostly the deer’s butt showing (making it harder to recognize) and it somehow blends in with a patch of unpaved road on the highway.

Paul S@TheSeekerOf42

Video is cut right before sensitive things appear on screen. Safe to watch.

4:03 AM · Oct 28, 2024 · 292K Views

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The Tesla software simply doesn’t recognize the deer at all (the car reportedly didn’t slow down at all before impact). However, in theory, every other AV player (using radar/LiDAR) would have clearly seen (before the headlights even shined on the deer) that a meaningful object was in the road and avoided an accident.

This example demonstrates how Tesla may be fundamentally constrained from achieving a superhuman level of driving by not adopting radar/LiDAR. We also have the fact that literally nobody else is building a cameras-only AV at this point, which suggests that everyone else thinks this is the worse approach.

Elon (to his credit?) on Tesla’s Q1’26 earnings call, basically all but admits that the company’s self-driving tech is still a ways off:

Questioner: “The next question is, is v14.3 still the last piece of the puzzle to enable large-scale unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi? Or do we have to wait until V15?”

Elon Musk: “Well, I think 14.3 is last piece of the puzzle for unsupervised FSD. Now the question is like degrees of safety. Like how — safety and convenience, I suppose. We have a lot of known improvements — like major architectural improvements that we know would improve the probability of safety significantly. So I think it’s not going to make sense for us to deploy unsupervised FSD or Robotaxi at large scale when we know that there are major architectural improvements to the software that can improve safety.

So I think we’re going to want to finish writing that software, validate it and release it before going to large-scale unsupervised FSD. Depending on what large scale means. I mean we are, of course, as I mentioned earlier, doing unsupervised FSD in 3 cities, and we’ll expand to, like I said, probably a dozen states or more later this year. So it kind of depends on what your definition of large scale is. But I do think it wouldn’t be right for us to go to like very large scale unsupervised FSD when we know that there are software improvements in the pipeline that would improve safety.”

All together, Tesla seems not ready to deploy a large-scale, unsurprised fleet of robotaxis for some time. I’d say they are officially behind Waymo, WeRide, Pony.ai and Apollo Go. I think it’s likely Tesla also falls behind at least NVIDIA as well over the coming years.

Here is Uber’s official position on Tesla’s L4 timeline from CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy from a Feb-26 interview with The Information:

“I would just come back to where they are today which is based on [Tesla’s] publicly reported data, their incident rate is effectively where Waymos’ incident rates were in Q1 of 2023. So on that basis, it looks like they’re about 3 years behind. And you know we’re not saying that Tesla is not going to get there. It’s entirely likely and possible that they would be there. But in that time there are going to be other players who will also deliver commercially deployable autonomous solutions and we have the broadest set of partnerships, right? We have 20 partners. We are looking forward to bringing them to the 15 markets we’ve talked about this year and that number is only going to go up in the coming years. And on our platform the utilization and revenue generation capacity is going to be higher than any anyone else’s. So we’ll compete on that.”

From Uber’s standpoint, Tesla looks to be ~3 years behind Waymo. This seems about right.

Autonomous Transition

The Peak-to-Trough Issue

Rideshare demand is, of course, variable. It varies a lot over the course of a day — peaking during afternoon rush hour and troughing in the middle of the night. It varies over the course of a week — Friday generally sees peak demand, and Sunday trough demand. From Uber’s Q4’24 AV Spotlight:

Demand also varies over the course of a year — it generally peaks in the spring and fall, while summer tends to be relatively slow.

Thus, as an AV-only provider, you have an issue. Do you carry enough cars to fulfill demand at peaks (but then leave many cars idling during troughs) or do you limit your fleet size to keep cars generally better utilized (but deliver poor ETAs during peak periods)?

Here is commentary from Uber’s Q4’24 supplemental:

“Finally, assuming that all four of the aforementioned commercialization issues have been addressed, AV operators will face another daunting challenge: the highly variable nature of ridesharing demand, which has large peaks and troughs throughout the day, week, month, and year. Any standalone player with a fixed depreciating asset will need to build against that reality: choosing between running a highly underutilized network (if supply is built for peak demand) or a highly unreliable network at peak periods (if supply is built for anything less than peak).

For instance, in a typical large city, a fixed fleet designed to meet the weekly peak will have up to 95% of vehicles idle during the multiple weekly troughs. Conversely, a fleet sized below peak cannot deliver the reliable 4-minute ETAs that consumers expect. This dilemma is compounded by the fact that vehicle supply will need to vary dramatically throughout the year: in many North American cities, demand peaks around March and trends down through the summer, only rebounding in the fall. Weekly peaks may be 50%+ higher than the lowest week of the year. On top of that, supply will need to constantly grow to meet overall industry expansion (Uber is still growing near 20% YoY), the trajectory of which is non-linear. This could mean that a fixed network that is well supplied in March may find itself idling a third or more of its vehicles for several months, until Halloween. Because demand patterns look similar (although not identical) between cities, underutilized vehicles cannot be easily repositioned and will likely sit unused for months, generating additional cost and complexity—against zero revenue.

Given the scale of the Uber platform, and human drivers’ ability to dynamically fulfill demand spikes—and take a break during demand troughs—partnering with Uber allows AV players to move much faster than they could on their own. This fact gives us confidence that the Uber network, with a hybrid of AV and human drivers, will deliver the highest asset utilization and revenue generation opportunity for our partners.”

In the geos in which it operates, Waymo has chosen to keep its fleet relatively constrained so far. This helps drive a better utilization on its vehicles (take it from Bill Gurley):

But it also, as Alex Immerman (an investor in Waymo) points out, allows Waymo to take advantage of some physical world first-mover advantages.

The optimal level of AVs to carry, I believe, is around ~1.0x average demand. If you go below that, say optimizing for 0.4x demand, your fleet will be better utilized (during troughs, the majority of your fleet would still be utilized), but (1) you’d leave a lot of money on the table and (2) customers would switch to providers with better ETAs. If you go above that, say optimizing for 1.4x demand, the majority of your fleet would sit idle during troughs, which would spoil your ROICs.

How Close are Uber’s Partners to L4?

Technically already crossed the L4 threshold:

• Apollo Go. Apollo Go is owned by Baidu, the Chinese internet/search giant. Apollo Go is the largest operator currently in China with more than 1,000 driverless vehicles in operation. Their weekly ride count surpassed 250k in Feb-26. The company is in the process of expanding into the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe (it already operates a driver-out commercial service with Uber in Dubai and Abu Dhabi). It hopes to have 20,000 robotaxis operating worldwide by 2027, including more than 1,000 vehicles in Dubai by early 2028. Baidu’s RT6, built by Jiangling (a Chinese carmaker), reportedly costs just $30k. In H2’26, Apollo Go is slated to begin testing a robotaxi pilot in London (with the RT6) in partnership with both Uber and Lyft.

• WeRide. WeRide is a public company listed on Nasdaq and based in Guangzhou, China. As of Jan-26, the company had more than 1,000 vehicles operating worldwide. It hopes to grow that figure to 2-3,000 by the end of 2026, and tens of thousands by 2030. It aims to have between 500-1,000 robotaxis operating in the Middle East alone by the end of 2026. WeRide already operates a commercial robotaxi service on behalf of Uber in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. In Jun-26, WeRide and Uber announced that they would launch a commercial robotaxi operation in Madrid, their first joint partnership in Europe. The service is slated to begin operations before the end of 2026. The two companies have outlined a partnership to bring joint operations to 15 cities by 2030 (with Madrid marking the fourth such city).

• Pony.ai. Pony, like WeRide, is also a Nasdaq-listed public company based in Guangzhou. Pony had ~1,000 vehicles in operation at the end of 2025. They are targeting 3,000+ by year-end 2026. The company has formed a partnership with Stellantis to deploy AVs in Europe, and launched Europe’s first commercial AV service with Uber in Zagreb, Croatia in Apr-26 (using cars from Chinese automaker Arcfox). The ODD was initially ~35 square miles across the Zagreb city center, and including the Zagreb airport. In Apr-26, Pony announced that it had switched to driverless in Dubai (commercial service targeted for H2’26). They also announced that their next-generation robotaxi in China will cost ~$33k, including the cost of AV hardware. Further, the company has a partnership with Toyota. The two companies are targeting the deployment of 1,000 Toyota bZ4X Gen-7 robotaxis by the end of 2026 in China.

Probably get there soon:

• Nuro. Nuro was founded in 2016 by two ex-Waymo engineers — Jiajun Zhu (“JZ”) and Dave Ferguson. The company is based in Mountain View, CA, and has raised a total of ~$2.2bn since its founding. Its original strategy was to build vertically integrated delivery bots, and it signed partnerships with Kroger, Domino’s, CVS, 7-Eleven and Uber. In 2024, however, in the face of a dearth of funding options and a very capital intensive business plan, they pivoted to a strategy of licensing the Nuro Driver to car OEMs/the robotaxi market. Nuro most recently raised at an $6bn valuation in Aug-25. Recent investors have included Uber, Baillie Gifford, NVIDIA, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Tiger Global and Greylock. In Jul-25, Nuro announced a joint partnership with Lucid and Uber to deploy 20,000+ Lucid vehicles with the Nuro Driver on Uber across “dozens” of markets. In Apr-26, Uber increased its purchase commitment to at least 35,000 Lucid vehicles (both commitments are based on Nuro/Lucid hitting certain milestones). Nuro has one of the strongest safety records in AV tech. The company has logged over 1.7mm autonomous miles on public roads with zero at-fault incidents or injuries. As mentioned previously, the Uber/Lucid/Nuro commercial service is slated to launch in H2’26 across the SF Bay Area. It stands to be Uber’s first robust, driverless commercial offering outside of Waymo in the US. It should be noted that Toyota’s VC arm, Woven Capital, is also an investor in Nuro. In Mar-26, it was reported that Nuro was testing its autonomous software in Tokyo with the Toyota Prius. A partnership with Toyota, the largest carmaker in the world by far, would clearly be a big win for Nuro (Waymo, it should be noted, has also been testing with Toyota). According to Gemini, Nuro has been primarily testing in Mountain View, Palo Alto, the broader SF Bay Area and Houston. According to Gemini’s review of Nuro’s twitter account, the company has been on “road trips” to Los Angeles, Austin and Phoenix. This may suggest that these cities are in line for 2027 deployments.

• Wayve. Wayve was founded (and spun out of the University of Cambridge) in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah. The company is based in London and has raised a total of $2.5bn over its lifetime. Wayve is considered one of the pioneers of “AV 2.0.” The company employs a giant neural net that learns to drive purely from raw data inputs (i.e. there’s no rules-based logic programmed into their driver), similar to how a LLM learns language. Further, the technology does not rely on extremely detailed, high-definition maps like Waymo. It employs a “mapless” approach that can adapt to a new city or vehicle in weeks, supposedly. In Feb-26, Wayve raised $1.2bn at a $8.6bn valuation from investors including Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Nissan. Investors from prior rounds include Uber, NVIDIA, Microsoft, SoftBank and Balderton (a London-based VC firm). As part of the round, Uber outlined plans to invest as much as $300m into a Wayve-powered robotaxi fleet to be deployed in 10 cities across multiple countries, including London and Tokyo (cities which are slated go live in H2’26). Wayve also has plans to integrate its ADAS (or L2++) tech into Nissan vehicles (slated for production in 2027) and Stellantis vehicles (slated for 2028).

• Waabi. Waabi is first and foremost a self-driving trucking software provider (though it also plans to service the self-driving car market). It was founded in 2021 and is based in Toronto. In Jan-26, Waabi raised a $750m Series C at a $3bn valuation co-led by Khosla Ventures, G2 Venture Partners and Uber (which invested $250m). The round has an option to be upsized by an additional $250m from Uber based on milestones that would support the deployment of 25k Waabi-powered robotaxis on the Uber platform. There was no timeline provided for the potential robotaxi rollout. The company’s CEO, Raquel Urtasun, was previously the Chief Scientist at Uber’s autonomous division, Uber ATG. Waabi already had a partnership with Uber Freight on the autonomous trucking side — Waabi has been running commercial trucking pilots on the Uber Freight network since 2023. One of Waabi’s key differentiators is “Waabi World,” an “ultra-realistic” genAI simulator. Using Waabi World, the company is supposedly able to significantly reduce its need for real-world testing while also enhancing safety performance. Waabi World supposedly has a 99.7% success rate when it comes to mimicking real-world physics.

Big Boys:

• NVIDIA. The $5tn mkt cap chip giant, NVIDIA, is also a “full-stack” AV tech provider. NVIDIA offers a full “soup-to-nuts” solution — the hardware, the system architecture, and the AV software (including data, training and simulation). Mercedes, for example, is a full-stack customer. Customers can also work with NVIDIA in just certain parts of the stack. Despite NVIDIA being a competitor of Tesla’s in AV software, Tesla is actually NVIDIA’s largest customer in automotive due to their partnership in training.⁴⁷ Nuro, Waabi and Wayve are “frenemies,” building on top of NVIDIA’s Hyperion platform and using pieces of NVIDIA’s broader AV offering. At CES in Jan-26, NVIDIA launched Alpamayo, a “family of open AI models, simulation tools and datasets designed to accelerate the next era of safe, reasoning‑based autonomous vehicle (AV) development.” Alpamayo seems to be “quasi” open source. The software is free to use, and in the future should get you all the way to L4 autonomy. You can even use it with your hardware of choice (i.e. you don’t need to use NVIDIA chips in-car). But to train the model and run simulations for your specific vehicle (apparently all car OEMs will need to do this to get production-ready), you’ll need to work with NVIDIA chips.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰ At NVIDIA’s Mar-26 GTC conference, Uber and NVIDIA announced “an expanded partnership to launch a fleet of autonomous vehicles entirely powered by the full-stack NVIDIA DRIVE AV software across 28 cities and four continents by 2028.” The rollout will begin with LA and the SF Bay Area in H1’27. Car OEMs are TBD, but could include any OEMs building on NVIDIA’s Hyperion platform (which includes NVIDIA compute and a pre-validated/open reference sensor suite/architecture). These OEMs include Mercedes, Lucid, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, BYD and Geely.⁵¹⁵² Jensen mentioned at the Jan-26 CES that NVIDIA had been working on self-driving for at least 6-7 years (including 5 years in partnership with Mercedes).

• Zoox. Zoox was founded in 2014, and is headquartered in Foster City, CA. Amazon acquired Zoox in Jun-20 for ~$1.2bn. Zoox’s AVs are designed in-house and purpose built to be “robotaxis.” The Zoox vehicles are toaster-shaped, aloe-green, feature carriage-style seating, and drive “bidirectionally” (i.e. there is technically no “front” or “back” of the vehicle). In late 2025, Zoox launched limited robotaxi services in Las Vegas and SF. The Zoox service in SF came with a very limited ODD (parts of SoMA, the Mission, the Design District). In Mar-26, Zoox quadrupled its SF service area to include the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, Pacific Heights and along the Embarcadero. In 2025, Zoox opened a 220k facility in Hayward, CA capable of producing 5k robotaxis annually, with the aim to eventually ramp to 10k. Zoox has so far partnered with Uber in Las Vegas (set to launch summer 2026) and Los Angeles (by mid-2027). Zoox intends to keep the SF market exclusively 1P to Zoox. Further, the company intends to make Zoox bookable through their 1P app in all markets, including Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Zoox recently launched limited offerings in Austin and Miami (without Uber), which makes for four markets served in total. Zoox is currently mapping and building a presence in at least eight additional US cities, including Dallas and Phoenix.

OEM-owned efforts:

• VW. In Apr-25, VW and Uber announced plans to deploy “thousands of all-electric, fully autonomous ID. Buzz AD vehicles within multiple US markets over the next decade, starting in Los Angeles.” These vehicles are essentially minivans, and my understanding is that VW plans to operate them as ride-pooling shuttles. Testing began in 2025, with a commercial launch expected in 2026. As of Apr-26, VW was still on track to launch the LA pilot by the end of 2026 (with safety drivers). It’s unclear what the initial ODD will be, but VW plans to expand to “multiple US markets.” The autonomous tech is powered by Mobileye, a long-time ADAS provider based in Israel and founded in 1999. “Pre-series” production has started on the autonomous ID. Buzz AD at the company’s Hanover plant (targeting 500 vehicles by the end of 2026). Large-scale “series” production is slated for 2027. My understanding is the AV hardware components will be integrated “in-line” during production. The company has over 100 test vehicles on the road across the US, Germany and Norway. VW aims to have 100k AVs on the road by 2033.

• Rivian. Rivian is an EV carmaker, founded in 2009, that is building its own autonomous software. The company is even building its own chips. Uber and Rivian stuck an agreement in Mar-26, where Uber would invest up to $1.25bn in Rivian, “subject to the achievement of certain autonomous milestones by specific dates.” Uber’s initial investment is $300m. Uber is expected to purchase 10,000 Rivian R2 robotaxis with the option to purchase up to 40,000 more beginning in 2030. The intention is to expand to 25 cities by 2031, starting with San Francisco and Miami in 2028. The R2 SUV is Rivian’s next-generation model that will debut with a ~$58k price tag (vs. $75-100k+ for its flagship R1), with more affordable versions planned, including a $45k model debuting late 2027. Rivian’s software is powerful enough that Volkswagen elected to strike a $5.8bn JV with the company to access Rivian’s EV architecture and software. VW is launching its first vehicle built on the Rivian platform — the ultra-cheap ID EVERY1 (a small, electric, four-door hatchback with a $21.5k price tag) — in 2027.

• Motional. Motional is a Boston-based self-driving venture owned by Hyundai. Originally a JV between Hyundai and Aptiv, Aptiv pulled out of the JV in 2024. In response, Hyundai put an additional $1bn into Motional while the company was forced to lay off ~40% of its workforce. Motional and Uber launched a robotaxi service (using factory-built Hyundai IONIQ 5s) in Las Vegas in Mar-26. The initial service features a human safety operator, but it is expected to go driverless by the end of 2026. Hyundai vice-chair Jaehoon Chang recently told his staff: “our survival and future depend on the shift to a software-driven mobility company.”

Wait, there’s more?

• Momenta. Momenta is another Chinese AV software provider that flies more under the radar than the “big 3” of Apollo Go, WeRide and Pony.ai. However, the company has drawn investment from Tencent, Temasek, SAIC motor, Toyota and Mercedes. The company raised funds in Sep-25 at around a $6bn valuation, reportedly. Momenta and Uber struck a partnership in May-25 to jointly target markets outside the US and China, and will begin testing a robotaxi service in Munich in 2026. Momenta is a partner of both Mercedes and BMW for their Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) which powers partial autonomy offerings like hands-free driving on highways.

• Avride. Avride was formed in 2017 by parent company Nebius Group, formerly Yandex (it sold off the Russia-based Yandex in 2024). The company is based in Austin. Avride develops self-driving technology for passenger vehicles as well as for sidewalk delivery robots. Uber uses Avride both for sidewalk robots and for a robotaxi service in Dallas, launched in Dec-25. The Avride robotaxi operation is currently limited to a very small ODD within Dallas. Avride’s delivery robots operate across Philadelphia, Jersey City, Austin, Dallas, Ohio State University, Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai.

• May Mobility. May Mobility is a start-up based in Ann Arbor. The company has formed partnerships with Uber and Lyft in the US as well as Grab in SE Asia. The company is partnered with Uber in Arlington/Dallas. May works with modified Toyota Sienna minivans, and operates in only a small portion of the city. The company is partnered with Lyft in Atlanta.

What Happens to Human Drivers as AV Prices Fall?

As the price of an AV drops below the price of a human driver, what will happen to human drivers? Will Uber have to cut driver rates/pay? And if so, will human drivers stop driving?

Uber has signaled that as AVs come onto the platform, they will take on the position of “baseload” supply. As a result, however, there won’t be enough AVs on Uber’s platform to meet peak demand — far from it. Thus, human drivers will need to come onto the platform to handle these peaks.

Peak demand will still require “surge” pricing. The surge pricing of the future, however, will not look like surge pricing today — it will probably look more like the standard pricing of today (as prices fall). But because of this, Uber drivers should still be able to earn reasonable pay (though less than before).

Some drivers will leave the platform as a result. If a driver only drove during peak hours before, as they didn’t want to drive for any less than the surge pricing rate, they will churn. However, there will be drivers that stay. For them, they will take the non-surge rate, even if they can only get it during peak hours.

Dara was asked explicitly about this issue on a Oct-25 Decoder podcast.

Interviewer: “I took an Uber to work today. I figured I should use your app before I talk to you. I asked the driver and he said I want my rates to go up…I’m curious how you’re going to make the rates go up as you have big fleet operators who now have giant fixed costs who are happy to have 24-7 utilization and maybe take a lower rate for greater use while the drivers still just want high rates. How do you how do you square that circle? Because it feels like the driver rates are going to get pushed down as autonomy comes into the mix.”

DK: “So I think that our job is going to be to manage the balance between demand and supply. I think autonomous is actually going to drive more demand. So that, you know, even though as a percentage of our overall inventory autonomous is going to be an ever increasing percentage, the overall demand — the number of drivers — that we need on our network over the next 5 to 10 years is going to increase because demand increases more, so to speak.

20 years from now you might be right and from that standpoint we just have to manage our inventory which is there’s a turnover of drivers all the time and we want to make sure that we give drivers the right expectations of earnings etc. And in a city where demand isn’t growing, maybe because autonomous supply is coming in, we just have to slow down recruiting of drivers and not make them [false] promises as it relates to earnings. So I think communication, being straight with people — that’s ultimate answer. But I don’t take it for granted. This is going to be a transition that we have to manage very, very carefully and make sure that our driver base is taken care of.”

I think Dara is potentially right that demand will actually go up for some period for human drivers as overall demand for rideshare increases. However, as AV prices really begin to fall (as well as take up a larger percentage of rides), Uber will need to gradually reduce pay and hours for their drivers.

Here is Uber’s Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal from a Nov-25 WSJ podcast, highlighting Uber’s unique ability to activate drivers during times of peak demand:

“For anyone to have enough cars on a Friday evening at 6 PM, when you both have this combination of commute as well as party traffic that’s starting to happen. You just can’t have enough cars, or if you try to deploy enough cars to be able to meet that demand, you’re gonna have a lot of idle time on your hands because these are assets that you’re deploying in the city.

Now we have the benefit of having a flexible supply pool in our core business, and we know when to deploy that supply pool, depending on the peaks and troughs of the demand in that particular city…So the flexible supply pool is our driver base. And we have now more than a decade of experience on how we work with our drivers to be able to bring them on the platform at the right time. If you look at the driver app, there is so much guidance that we provide. We communicate with them, the app tells them when it is busy, when they should come online, when there are incentives, what the earnings [will be]. So that’s a very well honed system for us on the driver’s side.”

What happens when prices are so low for AVs (say <$1 per mile vs. a human driver at $2+) that nobody would want to be matched with a human, even during peak hours?

In this case, Uber could be forced into a situation where it subsidizes human driver fares/pay in order to keep them on the platform. This would allow Uber to keep pricing lower for riders, but it would negatively impact Uber’s take rate and margins.

What Would a Nationwide Robotaxi Fleet Cost?

Based on my back-of the-envelope math, the cost of a nationwide fleet actually seems somewhat achievable. This is probably not a great thing for Uber, as it shows that Google/Amazon/Tesla are capable of building fleets that could have sizable impacts on the market.

If Waymo’s 3,000 vehicle fleet today is doing 500k rides per week, that’s 26mm rides per year or 8,667 rides per vehicle per year. If Uber is doing 2.2bn rides a year in its US mobility business, that’s in theory achievable with a fleet of ~250k cars (using the same 8,667 number). However, we know that a lot of these rides are happening simultaneously during peak hours. Thus, the actually fleet size will need to be something like ~3x larger, or ~750k vehicles.

If ultimately the price of an AV settles at ~$50k, then the cost of an entire US Uber-sized robotaxi fleet would be ~$38bn, in theory (or ~$7.5bn annually, assuming a 5-year vehicle life). However, if robotaxis were to grow to say 5% of all miles traveled in the US, that would mean a ~10x’ing of today’s fleet. Thus, instead of $7.5bn, you’d be looking at something more like $75bn annually, just for the US. If robotaxis grew to 15% of all miles traveled, you’d be looking at ~$225bn annually.

This figure doesn’t take into account the build-out of depots and charging infrastructure that would be needed to support such a fleet. It also doesn’t take into account operating costs, which might be ~3x the fleet’s depreciation cost. But let’s assume these costs are absorbed by the fleet operators and/or offset by revenues.

If we assume 75% of the cost of these vehicles can be offloaded to financing providers (i.e. we assume Waymo, Uber, etc. are only putting 25% down), then we are actually back down to manageable figures. Instead of $75bn annually, for instance, the capital required would be more like ~$20bn annually (to support a fleet that could handle ~5% of all miles traveled). Google or Amazon alone (with operating free cash flows in the ~$150-200bn range) could manage this type of spend.

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Delivery

Key Priorities

Supply, Supply, Supply

The first rule of building a vibrant marketplace is building supply. Supply, according to Uber management, “broadens the appeal of the marketplace, attracts new customers, and drives engagement with existing customers.”

Uber Eats is still relatively early across its top markets in terms of bringing merchants onto the platform. The chart below from Uber’s 2024 investor day shows the percentage of total potential restaurant and grocery locations that were actually on the Uber Eats platform. As we can see, there is still a lot of room for Uber to grow its merchant base.

From the 2024 investor day:

“Another key opportunity for us is bringing more merchants to the marketplace. We think of new merchants like a streaming platform thinks about new content. It fundamentally broadens the appeal of our marketplace, attracting new consumers while driving more engagement with existing ones. We’re making great progress, but we’re still quite early across our top markets with roughly 20% of available restaurants and grocery stores on our platform. We’re building tech to drive down on-boarding time, improve self-sign-up and self-service and tools to make our commercial teams more effective and more productive.”

When I compare the restaurants on Uber Eats in my area (SF Bay Area) to those on DoorDash, it’s hard to tell much of a difference. All the restaurants I regularly order from (from the national chains to the local single-location restaurants) are on both.

Penetrating the Suburbs

The suburbs are a big focus for Uber in delivery, as they are in mobility.⁵³ In delivery, like in mobility, Uber originally focused its efforts in city centers. This made sense to most people at the time. The city centers are the most dense in terms of supply and demand. So it should follow that these areas would be the most profitable (high volume, high amount of batching). It is also where Uber was strongest in mobility.

Here is Dara on a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast:

“I’d say one mistake was that we focused too much on the big cities. Uber was in the big cities. Uber was a big city business. That’s where mobility was. Started in Paris and then New York and Sao Paulo. Those are our biggest cities, London. And it turns out there’s a huge market outside of the large cities, especially with delivery.

Suburbs, [more] sparse areas — it’s actually one of our top growth areas now. You know, seven, eight years in, we’re still growing at like one and a half to three times the speed that we’re growing in the big cities. And we could have focused on that earlier…We overfitted to big cities and we completely ignored the suburbs because we just made assumptions about the suburbs that turned out to be wrong.”

It turned out that the suburbs are actually a great (superior?) market for delivery: (1) it’s a larger overall market than the city centers (the suburbs are ~60% of the delivery market, according to Uber estimates), (2) order sizes are larger (read: families) which are more profitable orders to serve, all things equal (higher delivery fee), (3) it’s much easier to drive around in the suburbs, find parking, etc. (helps with ETAs, driver retention), and (4) the most obvious downsides of serving the suburbs (less batching, more downtime) turns out are somewhat mitigated by the fact that restaurants still tend to be clustered together in “downtown” areas (which helps with batching, positioning drivers).

Key to penetrating the suburbs is (1) supply, (2) low ETAs, and (3) attractive pricing — three dimensions where Uber is making progress. Here is CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy at a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference describing Uber’s strategy in the suburbs. He alludes to the fact that Uber has yet to really go “all-in” on the suburbs.

Analyst: “If we think about sort of pairing the sparse market mobility strategy with the cross-pollination strategy into Eats, how far away are you being able to say, ‘Look, we’re making progress in the sparse markets on rides. Now we’re going to really sort of press more into the delivery and the food and everything else?’ Is that a ‘27 dynamic? Is it ‘26? When can that investment happen?”

Balaji Krishnamurthy: “Yes. So it’s definitely something we think about. But before we start pressing on those kind of investments, we have to ensure that the quality of our product is excellent on both sides, right? And for delivery, the way to measure that is do we have the right kind of selection in every market. So if you’re in a sparse market, we cannot just show you McDonald’s, Subway, Starbucks and hope where consumers to be sticking to us because we do need to bring you the local champions in that market, and we have to get you the best selection from that town or city. So there’s still selection work that we’re doing, right?

Then, you have to ensure that the way your courier motion is in that market is also different, right? In dense markets, you can get to couriers on a very hands-off basis. They can come in and out of the system whenever they like because there’s enough density, whereas in sparser markets, you need to allow scheduling, you need to be able to tell couriers when to log on and when they can expect to find business, right? So there’s work that’s happening on that side of the marketplace as well. Suffice to say, it’s not lost on us.

It’s definitely a part of our plan, but we need to ensure that the product quality on both sides is good before we start making that investment. Otherwise, we’re not getting the returns we expect there.”

While Uber has been late to the suburbs, it’s now a clear focus for the company. And Uber seems to be having good success. Per Dara above, Uber is growing 1.5-3x faster in the suburbs than in the cities.⁵⁴

Grocery, Retail, Direct

Uber is extending delivery beyond restaurants. The next categories up are grocery, retail and “direct” (or offering “white label” delivery for merchants who take orders through proprietary channels). Uber now even allows users to return retail items through Uber Eats (this is, to date, limited to items that were also purchased through Uber Eats).

The grocery and retail businesses are doing $12-13bn in gross bookings today (ex DH). In terms of grocery/retail “supply” on the Uber app, Uber management would tell you its around the level where food delivery was in 2019-2020. At that point in time, the food delivery business was at a very similar scale to where grocery/retail is today.⁵⁵

Grocery is particularly attractive in that (1) it’s a huge market (2x+ bigger than restaurants), (2) it’s highly repetitive in nature, (3) the basket sizes are relatively large (so delivery is more profitable, all things equal), (4) you can batch more easily because food temperature isn’t as important and volume per store is higher and (5) it’s a relatively straightforward cross-sell opportunity to tack on to food orders (ala DoorDash’s “DoubleDash”).

Grocery is also, however, a total knife fight. It’s low margin to begin with. And Uber is going up against very large, very formidable, and very verticalized players in Walmart, Costco and Amazon, who also offer same-day delivery. Amazon, as mentioned earlier, seems to be blowing the doors off their grocery business. There is also fierce competition from DoorDash and Instacart in the US (globally Uber considers itself in “pole position” when it comes to groceries⁵⁶).

Uber has some tailwinds behind its grocery business: (1) Uber is in the “top-up” category, a category that is growing quickly (it’s increasingly easy/cheap to buy groceries more incrementally vs. large periodic orders) and (2) it benefits from a very logical cross-sell motion to its huge base of Uber Eats users.

Here is Dara from a Sep-25 Goldman conference discussing Uber’s “top-up” positioning:

“So there’s a very, very long road map as it relates to grocery and delivery. Today, the grocery habits that we see are more of a top-up habit, which is, call it, $30, $40, $50 basket sizes versus the $100-plus weekly shop. So we’re much more in the top-up category. But what we’re seeing is 2 things. One is top-ups as a percentage of the overall grocery category are going up because it’s just becoming easier.

It used to be — I used to be an appointment shopper, my wife and I would go to the grocery store once a week, once every 2 weeks and load up, where you can just kind of order — just like with Amazon, it’s like I’ll order a single thing and press delivery there. With Eats, if you’re a member, get 2 or 3 things. It’s no big deal. So we’re seeing kind of top-ups grow as a percentage of the overall category. And we think eventually, as you get more consumers embedded into our ecosystem, we can become that weekly shop, and we can increase the basket size substantially.

But right now, the focus is just drive selection, just drive frequency within that top-up area and then eventually, you can become kind of the prime area for shopping.”

Still only ~18%⁵⁷ of Uber Eats users have tried Grocery and Retail, so there is significant room to grow these categories. While grocery is not currently a profitable business for Uber, as orders get larger, and as more orders are batched, profitability should improve. Further, grocery is also the category most easily monetized through advertising (even more so than food). Uber is only in the initial stages of its ad monetization journey in grocery.⁵⁸

Drive Affordability

Driving affordability is a big priority for Uber Eats.

The shear amount of merchant-funded offers I see in Uber Eats is noticeable. Uber seems very intent on showing a consistency large number of offers. From a Mar-25 Morgan Stanley conference:

“When you look at Uber Eats, for example, we are — one of our biggest programs is what we call merchant-funded offers. So actually, merchants providing buy one, get one free, if you spend $30 on a basket, gets a $10 item for free, et cetera. These are promotions that these merchants run. Those promotions give merchants more access to our audience, and merchant-funded offers are now running at over $1 billion of, call it, savings for our eaters per year as well.”

$1bn of savings on ~$75bn of GB (if we take Uber Eats’ GB from the time of the quote) may not seem like a ton (~1%). But if we assume the average savings on an offer is 10%, that would imply ~13% of orders came with a merchant-funded offer attached.

The Uber One membership also adds considerably to affordability ($0 delivery fee, up to 10% off orders over a minimum subtotal). Within Uber Eats, Uber One members represent 60%+ of bookings (significantly greater than their percentage of overall bookings).⁵⁹

As density further improves, greater batching should also drive affordability. Around 50% of orders are batched today, per Dara’s Jun-26 Invest Like the Best interview.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, AVs will very likely ratchet up affordability in the not too distant future (no tips, lower cost per delivery over time).

Grow the Ads Business

One particularly profitable line of business for Uber, housed almost entirely within Uber Eats, is its advertising business. Uber generated “well over” $2bn in ARR from advertising in Dec-25, up over 50% YoY. Delivery advertising as a percentage of delivery GB crossed 2% in 2025 and seems poised to go significantly higher.

See Investment Merits for more discussion.

TAM

According to DoorDash, as of 2022, total restaurant spend across the markets it serves (which overlap strongly with Uber Eats’ markets) is over $1 trillion (and grocery & convenience spend is over $2.5 trillion).⁶⁰

Uber hasn’t provided much in the way of an official delivery TAM over the past few years. Management did have this to say on Q3’25 earnings:

“And listen, food is a huge category. It’s no surprise. This is a $2 trillion TAM in food and kind of a $10 trillion TAM in grocery.”

Since this statement, Uber has expanded into an additional 20+ new markets through its acquisition of Delivery Hero. Thus, its TAM estimate will have gone up materially.

If we combine the 2025 bookings for Uber Eats, Delivery Hero (the portion Uber is acquiring) and DoorDash we get to $235bn of total bookings. Assuming 85% of this is food delivery, this gets us to ~$200bn of combined food delivery bookings. Assuming a TAM of $1.5tn, $200bn of bookings would equate to ~13% of the market. If we assume a TAM of $2.0tn it would equate to ~10% of the market, and if we assume a TAM of $2.5tn, it would equate to ~8% of the market.

In terms of food delivery penetration of overall restaurant spend, Uber has estimated that it’s in the mid-teens (vs. the mid-20s for overall ecommerce).⁶¹

Competitive Landscape

Uber Eats’ competitive set varies by geo.

In the US, by far Uber’s toughest competitor is DoorDash, which owns ~60% of the market, more than double that of Uber Eats. Internationally, Uber is a more dominant platform, especially post DH. Internationally, Uber competes mostly with DoorDash (which owns Wolt and Deliveroo) or regional players, many of whom are owned by Prosus (Just Eat, Lieferando, iFood, Skip, Thuisbezorgd, etc.).

Below is a highly unofficial table of market share by country for food delivery.

As a side note, the TAM estimates by country (in the table above) were provided by Gemini. It estimates the restaurant TAM across Uber’s markets to be ~$2.8tn — well above DoorDash’s TAM estimate (of $1bn) and Uber’s TAM estimate (of $2bn). Gemini’s estimated restaurant + grocery/convenience TAM across Uber’s markets is ~$8.5bn. The US represents roughly half this TAM according to Gemini.

We can see from above that while DoorDash has strong share in the US, Uber has similarly strong share in many international markets.

It seems Uber will be tough to dislodge in international markets. Uber offers both mobility and delivery, an advantage that none of Uber’s competitors benefit from. And Uber’s higher market share should provide for lower ETAs and prices. It’s a formidable combination and it doesn’t seem to allow for any type of wedge with which a competitor could take share.

Here is CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy detailing the mobility + delivery advantage on Uber’s Q4’25 earnings call:

“Our international footprint on Eats is not quite what it is with our mobility business. Every time we launch Eats along with mobility, we just have a structural advantage over the other players. And we’re able to grow category position. We were the #3 in the U.K. We’re #1, all organic. We launched from scratch in Germany and now are neck and neck with a top player in Germany in a lot of individual cities. Japan was another organic launch, and we’re by far the #1 player in Japan.”

In this Nov-25 HD in HD podcast, Dara interestingly expresses his regret in exiting the India delivery market. He knows, given Uber’s strength in mobility in India, that Uber would’ve ultimately had wedge to take share in what is a huge and growing delivery market.

“We made some moves that I regret. Like we got out of food in India. It’s a huge market. It’s a challenging market. But I would have liked to be multi-platform the way we are in mobility and delivery in the US and the UK. It gives us — the platform — gives us huge advantages in terms of Uber just being a part of your everyday life. And while those were good financial decisions at the time, boy, I’d love to be in food in some of the countries that we pulled out of.”

Here is management from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference on their success in taking share internationally:

“So U.S., our category position is relatively stable. It’s a great category where both Uber Eats and DoorDash are benefiting from the expansion of the category. But outside the U.S., we have continued to gain share even though our position is 2 to 3x as large as the next player in the market.

And I’m talking about large markets like Canada, France, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, right, all of which we are now at a strong #1 position and the U.K. as well, we are in a good #1 position now. So from a category position standpoint, there’s a lot of momentum that we’re getting there.”

DoorDash

DoorDash is a strong competitor in the US and globally.

DoorDash generated ~$100bn in GOV in 2025 (Uber Eats generated ~$132bn post DH). DoorDash generated ~$14bn of revenue and ~$2.8bn of adj EBITDA (Uber Eats generated ~$29bn of revenue and $5.8bn of adj EBITDA post DH, however Uber Eats’ EBITDA figure excludes its share of Uber’s “corporate G&A” and “platform R&D”).

DoorDash ended 2025 with 35m DashPass members, up 59% YoY. Uber ended 2025 with 46m Uber One members (ex DH), up ~53% YoY. DoorDash, it should be noted, is closely aligned with JPMorgan Chase. Premium Chase cardholders (Sapphire Reserve & Preferred), of which there are ~5-7mm, receive complementary DashPass subscriptions. This partnership has been in place since 2020, and is currently locked in through Dec-27. Uber has its own partnership with Amex. Premium Amex cardholders (Platinum & Gold), of which there are ~6-7mm, receive free Uber Cash varying from $120 to $320 annually.

As mentioned above, DoorDash focused its efforts in the suburbs early on, while Uber focused on the urban core. This proved to be a smart decision on DoorDash’s part and explains much of the move in DoorDash’s US market share from ~20% to ~60% over the last ~8 years (see chart below).

Below Dara comments on competition with DoorDash in a Stratechery interview from Feb-25. Uber is betting that over time, its combination of delivery + mobility (and the superiority of the Uber One membership), combined with a greater focus on the suburbs (increased selection, better reliability), will give Uber an opportunity to take back share:

“But coming back to the competition against DoorDash, I do think that one thing that they got right was really focusing on the suburbs. If you look in the US, in terms of the suburbs, it’s actually 60 plus percent of the marketplace. Uber has always been a really urban market. We grew up in cities. That’s where we already had the liquidity of the marketplace, and Uber Eats was kind of — they drive people, drive stuff as well. It was an offshoot, so I think DoorDash got the suburban family first, we got the urban 20-something year old first. We’re now kind of coming into each other’s markets.

DoorDash’s market, the suburbs turned out to be larger than the urban markets, but for us, suburbs and less dense markets, actually, not only are there a huge opportunity for Uber Eats, not just in the US, but all over the world. We’re going into secondary cities, tertiary cities, but it’s actually a really big opportunity with Uber. As we started expanding Eats into the suburbs, we’re seeing that there’s also Uber demand there. So actually, moving into these less dense cohorts and neighborhoods is a huge opportunity for Uber Eats, but also Uber as well, which is I think we’ve got another three to five years of penetration ahead of us.

You looked in the last quarter, Eats actually accelerated its gross bookings level, so it’s going to be a dog fight with DoorDash, but they’re a strong competitor. We’re a really strong competitor, and I’m very, very confident that the network effect that we have, Rides, Eats, along with the Uber One Membership program that’s now 30 million strong, ultimately is going to come out on top of the full competitive field in food and grocery…

I think it’s very difficult for companies to do more than one thing or build more than one brand. Not only are we multi-service, but we also expanded internationally much faster than, let’s say, the DoorDash’s of the world and many other competitors of the world, and on a short-term basis, it’s much harder. You’ve got to build more services, you have to generalize for the international markets. It takes longer to build things, but over the long term, we think it’s a much stronger strategic position to be in.

Again, DoorDash, they do only one thing, we think our superpower is in the platform. Their superpower, you could say, is in their focus. Every piece of evidence that we’re seeing is that the platform is winning against the whole ecosystem. Obviously, the markets that we’re chasing are much, much broader than just the DoorDash’s out there.”

Here is Dara again making the case that Uber has a path to take share on a Jun-23 Acquired podcast. He is pretty explicit that Uber will be willing to be loss-making in its efforts to gain share in the US:

“DoorDash is a tough competitor. DoorDash is larger than we are in the U.S. We are focused on keeping share in the U.S, gaining a bunch of share outside the U.S., and then over a period of time using the structural advantage of, one, profit pools outside of the US and then use the structural advantage that we talked about in terms of customer acquisition, over a period of time to hopefully gain category position against DoorDash. But they’re a tough competitor. We respect them. We don’t like them, but we respect them.”

Internationally, DoorDash has made aggressive moves to expand inorganically. In Nov-21, Uber acquired Wolt for a massive ~3.2x multiple of GMV. And in May-25, DoorDash acquired Deliveroo for a much smaller ~0.3x multiple of GMV. Wolt was founded in Finland in 2014. The company has leading market share in the Nordics, and has expanded into Eastern Europe over time. In it’s two largest markets, however (Germany and Poland — which Wolt entered in 2020 and 2018, respectfully), Wolt remains stuck in a distant trailing position. It is in the #3 position in Germany behind Lieferando and Uber (Uber entered after Wolt in 2021), and in the #3/4 position in Poland behind Pyszne.pl and Glovo (and perhaps tied with Uber).

DoorDash seems to lack a clear wedge through which to expand internationally other than trying to slowly grind it out through incentives and perhaps an incrementally better product (greater selection, higher reliability, product innovations like “DoubleDash”).

I think its fair to say that Uber has fared much better internationally. Here is management from Q1’25 earnings:

“To your question in terms of competition, especially in Europe, we’re really, really happy about our results in Europe. We recently, we believe, got to the #1 category position in the U.K. with Eats, entirely organically. We didn’t have to buy our way into glory, so to speak. France remains a top market for us. And we think that Germany, for example, is a market that holds a significant amount of promise. I think we launched in Germany 3 to 4 years ago, and our category position continues to increase in Germany as we invest in that market, both on the mobility and delivery side.

So we’re seeing very encouraging trends in Europe. And frankly, it’s not a surprise to see some of our competitors look to expand there inorganically. We like organic expansion more. We’ve been investing for years in these marketplaces, and I think it shows in our results.”

Shots fired!

DoorDash has also recently lost out to Uber on a couple of key partnerships.

After years of rumors that DoorDash would launch its own POS software (putting it into competition with Toast), in Nov-25 Toast (the leading POS software provider in the US with $100bn+ of GPV, or ~15-18% market share) announced that it would make Uber Eats the default delivery partner for “native” restaurant orders (or orders coming directly to a restaurant’s website), replacing DoorDash. It also announced that restaurant owners could launch Uber Eats promotions, update menus and changes photos right from the Toast dashboard.

In Mar-25, OpenTable, the leading aggregator of restaurant reservations with ~50% market share in the US, and Uber announced a partnership where Uber would integrate OpenTable’s reservation inventory into Uber’s new “Dine Out” tab. OpenTable will also be powering reservations for Uber in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Ireland and Australia. The integration highlights discounts that restaurants are offering and provides Uber One members with exclusive access to certain reservations. Additionally, within the OpenTable app, after making a reservation, users will be prompted to pre-book an Uber “reserve” ride (and in doing so will receive a discounted fare).

Instacart

Instacart is a ~$10bn mkt cap grocery delivery marketplace based almost entirely in the US.

Instacart generated $37bn in GOV in 2025, which was up 11% YoY. It generated revenue of $3.7bn and EBITDA of $1.1bn. The company served 26mm+ customers in 2025, and ~10mm in just the month of Dec-25. It is partnered with 2,200+ retailers across ~100k total locations. It has ~600k “shoppers” on the platform fulfilling orders. In Q4’25, GTV was up 14% YoY, representing Instacart’s strongest quarterly growth in 3 years.

Instacart’s key grocery partners include Costco, Kroger, Aldi, Publix, Albertsons (including Safeway and Vons), Publix, and Meijer.

Instacart generates much bigger grocery “baskets” than the likes of Uber Eats and DoorDash. Since 2020, Instacart’s average order has “consistently been $110 or more.” Instacart also has a robust advertising business, which generated ~$1.1bn of revenue in 2025, or ~2.9% of GTV. If you apply a ~60-70% margin to that, advertising dollars would have represented well north of half of the company’s overall EBITDA in 2025.

The company has ~$1.4bn of cash and no debt. It bought back $1.4bn in shares in 2025, including $1.1bn in Q4’25 alone (10% of its market cap!).

Instacart seems like a prime M&A target for Uber and Uber is perhaps the most logical buyer for Instacart.

Adding significant heft to Uber’s grocery business through an Instacart acquisition would be a win for Uber. Uber trails DoorDash in food delivery by a wide margin in the US, and Instacart would help close the gap meaningfully. A deal would seem highly synergistic, to boot: (1) tech platform, ad platform, SG&A cost synergies, (2) a meaningful uplift in batching by combining volumes, (3) synergies in combining their pools of couriers (more liquid supply, better pay for couriers given more volume/less downtime), and (4) better ad monetization of Uber’s grocery business. DoorDash has actually gotten more “verticalized” in its grocery offering with DashMart, putting it somewhat into competition with it’s grocery merchants. Uber has shied away from going “vertical,” so Instacart would be a better fit for Uber in that respect. Additionally, Uber and Instacart actually already have a close partnership: Uber powers the restaurant delivery feature in the Instacart app. Uber would also likely have an easier time (vs. DoorDash) of overcoming antitrust concerns.

Steve Jang, an early Uber investor, basically makes the case for an Uber/Instacart acquisition in a Nov-24 interview with Yahoo! Finance:

“Another area of acquisition — you know, the FTC aside and those approvals necessary for it. I really feel that the grocery category is adjacent, it’s relevant, it plugs right into the network. I think something in that area would be very, very exciting and makes a lot of sense as a plug-and-play acquisition.”

Delivery Hero Acquisition

Delivery Hero is a conglomerate of food delivery brands that operates across ~70 countries. In 2025, the company generated €49bn of GMV (up 9% YoY), ~€15bn of revenue and ~€900m of EBITDA. ~90% of its GMV comes from markets where it holds the #1 position, according to Delivery Hero management.

Its key brands include: Glovo (Europe), talabat (MENA ex Saudia Arabia), Hungerstation (Saudi Arabia), PedidosYa (LatAm ex Brazil and Mexico), foodpanda (SE Asia), and Baemin (South Korea).

Delivery Hero was founded in Berlin in 2011 and was originally a platform where restaurants with their own delivery drivers could take orders (i.e. simple lead gen). It expanded globally through acquisitions that included PedidosYa in 2014, talabat, Hungerstation and foodpanda in 2016, Baemin in 2019 and Glovo in 2022. In 2018, Delivery Hero actually sold off its entire German business (Lieferheld, Pizza.de and foodora’s Germany unit), citing intense competition.

In Jul-26, Uber announced that it had agreed to the acquisition of Delivery Hero for €41.50 per share. This equates to an equity value of $14.8bn, or $13.7bn taking into account Uber’s “prior stake purchases” (Uber built a position in Delivery Hero shares at lower prices over the last ~1.5 years). The acquisition is expected to close in H2’27.

Uber management believes it is paying ~8x EV / 2027E adj. EBITDA for Delivery Hero. This figure is based on Delivery Hero’s consensus 2027 EBITDA estimate and includes $1.2bn of expected run-rate synergies.

Delivery Hero was acquired after a period of turmoil for the company. In the midst of its expansion, the Delivery Hero over-levered itself to the tune of €4.1bn in net debt at the end of its 2023 — a year in which company generated just ~€250m in adjusted EBITDA and negative free cash flow.

The situation attracted activist investors Sachem Head in 2024 (which took a Board seat) and Aspex Management in 2026 (which amassed a ~9% stake). In Dec-25 the company formally announced a strategic review, and in Mar-26 confirmed that it had engaged JPMorgan as part of the process.

In May-24, the company agreed to sell its foodpanda Taiwan business to Uber for $950m, but the deal was ultimately blocked on antitrust concerns. Uber had to pay a termination fee of $242m to Delivery Hero in Apr-25 as a result. Delivery Hero eventually agreed to sell this business to Grab Holdings for $600m in Mar-26. Additionally, in Dec-24, Delivery Hero IPO’d its talabat business, selling a 20% stake for proceeds of €1.8bn.

As a result of these actions, Delivery Hero was able to meaningfully reduced its debt burden. In the meantime. the company also significantly enhanced its profitability, generating €903m of EBITDA in 2025.

DH’s strategic review process also drew the attention of Uber. As part of the blocked foodpanda Taiwan acquisition, Uber separately bought $300m in newly issued Delivery Hero shares (good for around ~2.5% of the company). Then, starting Apr-26, Uber began rapidly expanding its stake in Delivery Hero. Through a series of transactions, Uber ultimately amassed a ~37% stake in the business prior to the transaction announcement.

Uber, however, was not able to ultimately acquire all of Delivery Hero’s segments due to presumably regulatory/anti-trust hurdles, primarily in Europe. We can see below that Uber didn’t acquire most DH segments in which it already had a presence:

Delivery Hero’s crown jewels seem to be (1) its Baemin business in South Korea (~60% market share), (2) its talabat and Hungerstation businesses in MENA, (3) its Glovo business in Spain (~55% share) and (4) some of its PedidosYa units in LatAm. Its foodpanda business seems relatively challenged (i.e. trailing Grab) across most of the SE Asia markets in which is operates.

I think DH is ultimately a smart acquisition for Uber:

• The price is reasonable at 8x EBITDA. This bakes in a large amount of synergies ($1.2bn). But Uber management is adamant that, if anything, they are sandbagging this synergy estimate.⁶²

• Provides Uber with significantly more scale. The acquisition will add $42bn of gross bookings, taking Uber’s total GB from $193bn to $235bn (a 22% increase). EBITDA will increase by ~$2.2bn, from $8.7bn to ~$11.0bn (a 26% increase).

• Adds leading markets. Of the 50 markets added, 38 of them are in the #1 position, according to Uber management. Baemin, talabat and Hungerstation in particular seem like crown jewel assets. Undoubtedly Uber would have liked to have added Glovo’s Spain unit, but Uber already operates in the country in the #2 position.

• Shifts more profits to delivery. Prior to DH, Uber generated ~31% of its profits from delivery. Post DH, Uber will generate ~42% of its profits from delivery. The delivery business is less exposed to AV risk.

• Shifts more profits overseas. Prior to DH, Uber generated ~54% of total revenue from international markets. Post DH, Uber will generate ~63% of revenue from international markets. International markets are less exposed to AV risk.

• Almost doubles Uber’s number of multi-product markets. As discussed, Uber’s multi-product offering is a key differentiator for the company. Thus, the ~doubling of these markets is a great development. The Delivery Hero segments being acquired will be better businesses on a go-forward basis, as they will be combined with a mobility offering.

  

  The acquisition also gives Uber some “delivery-only” markets for the first time (e.g. Philippines, Singapore, Cote d’Ivoire, Morocco, Venezuela). Perhaps this gives Uber the opportunity to add mobility in these countries.

The downside to this acquisition, of course, is that it adds leverage. The deal will be financed with a €14bn bridge facility (to be refinanced) and cash on hand. However, if all goes according to plan, Uber will only be ~1x levered (on a net basis) by 2027. That’s pretty manageable, even in a fast-changing industry like Uber’s. My hope would be that Uber pays down its debt rapidly. The company has the ability to do so, but Uber has also committed to continuing with its buyback activity and also buying a significant number of AVs (discussed later).

Autonomous Transition

We’re headed for a world, as a result of AVs, where the cost of delivery (delivery fees + tips) could fall by 50%+. There should be a lot more deliveries in this world.

The growing consensus seems to be that in the future, some combination of (1) sidewalk robots, (2) mid-range delivery bots (that can drive on residential streets and in bike lanes), and (3) drones will handle our on-demand delivery needs.

Here is Dara on a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast:

“We think delivery is going to be a combination of sidewalk robots that we have in place. We’ve got 10 partnerships now all around the world — Serve, Cartken, Avride, and a bunch of others. And these are like, I don’t know if you’ve seen them, these robots that walk along the sidewalks for short deliveries. They’re not around in New York yet. So that’s one. And then there’ll be drones. So there’ll be drone delivery that gets you deliveries longer distances in the suburbs. And there are a number of players there. We recently made an investment in Flytrex, who we’re going to partner up with. And I think we’ll have some other partners. And then there might be an in-between, like bike lane robots or maybe cars although I think that’s probably too expensive a bill of materials to carry around food.”

Here is Dara again on the On with Kara Swisher podcast from Dec-25. He discusses the three AV form factors that will be a part of the delivery solution. He also discusses the “last mile” challenge related to AV delivery.

“So, number one, I would say Uber Eats is an absolute star in our portfolio. Like, it was it was 10% of our business when I took over. It’s now almost 50%. The team is doing a great great job there.

There isn’t going to be — I think AV for mobility is clear because the first mile and last mile taken care of. Like you walk to the car, you walk away from the car. With delivery, it’s actually an amalgamation of solutions. So, we have sidewalk robots for short deliveries within a mile, mile and a half. But for a three-mile delivery, it just doesn’t work. For those three mile deliveries in urban destinations, we’re probably going to have to use either AVs that go in bike lanes or go on the road as well so that they can get there faster. I’d say that is behind [versus] sidewalk robots [which] are coming first. And then in suburbs etc., it’s going to be drones. And we are far from commercializing that technology. We’re in the experimentation phase, but it’ll be the three of those.

And then the question is who’s going to take care of the first mile and last mile? Restaurants still, they’re busy. They don’t like coming out of the restaurant, putting the food in the robot, etc. And people are lazy, you know, they don’t want to come down to — if they’re in a high-rise. I remember when I was delivering food — like it’s amazing, people would deliver from a Chipotle three blocks away because they just want the food at their doorstep. So the first and last mile is still to be solved, but I do think AV is also going to be a huge application as it relates to Eats. And I think our Eats business is ultimately potentially going to be bigger than mobility.”

The last mile challenge might initially be solved through simply lower pricing. If you want a cheaper delivery through a sidewalk robot, you might have to walk out to the curb if in the suburbs or downstairs to the lobby if in a high-rise. For restaurants, they will have to decide if they are willing to walk orders out to delivery bots sitting outside (my sense is most will be).

As mentioned, Uber is already partnered with a handful of providers of both sidewalk robots and drones. Interestingly, they are finding that the economics of using sidewalk robots are actually already better, in some instances. Here is CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy from a Mar-26 Morgan Stanley conference discussing Uber’s progress with delivery AVs:

“I think on that front, we’re in a pretty good spot. We already have over 1,000 delivery bots on our network in more than 10 cities. We’re working with about 7 partners in that ecosystem. It spans both sidewalk robots and drones.

And what we are seeing right now is sidewalk robots have potential, but they come with their own friction, right? You are -- if you’re a merchant or a consumer, you’re now used to seeing a courier show up to your counter, pick up the order and drop it off at your doorstep, whereas sidewalk robots have friction on both ends, and you have to go out and meet the bot. Drones, on the other hand, can be faster. They can cover a larger radius, and they can potentially even drop off the package in your backyard. So there’s a broader use case there.

I think we are going to keep exploring and see where this goes. The good news is that economics of these deployments is already quite attractive for us. It’s interesting for us to be able to deploy these while not having to make a deep investment, and we’re learning as we go. Long term, no question in our mind that drones and bots will play a much bigger role in delivery, but there’s still some things to be ironed out.”

How might delivery economics look in an AV future? Below is some back-of-the-envelope analysis, showing what the cost of delivery could be for both sidewalk robots and drones.

For sidewalk robots, I assume the cost of the robot is $4k and that it lasts 3 years. I assume $3.50 per day for cellular costs, $0.25 per day for electricity and $2,500 annually for storage, repairs and tele-operations. If we also assume the robot does 7 deliveries per day, this works out to $2.04 in costs per delivery.

Next, I show how the economics of an $18 food order could be divvied up — contrasting a human courier delivery with an AV delivery. With the AV, I eliminate the $2.50 tip and take delivery fees down from $4 to $3.50. As a result, the consumer is paying $21.50 instead of $24.50 (12% savings). Uber still earns its $4.50, and the restaurant actually earns a bit more. The “courier” earns just $2.50 instead of $6.50. Alternatively, you could keep the delivery fees at $4.00 and give more to the restaurant, etc.

Any way you slice it, its a better outcome for the consumer, the restaurant and Uber (even if Uber earns the same amount per transaction — or even less — there will be more of them). In the example above, the consumers is saving ~46% on delivery fees (paying $3.50 with AVs vs. $6.50 without). With larger basket sizes, the savings would be even greater.

Here is the same analysis but for a drone. Again these numbers are just estimates and theoretical. Here I assume the drone costs $15k and that it lasts 4 years. We get to a pretty similar result in terms of cost per delivery.

Note that both examples above don’t assume any batching, which would further reduce the cost per delivery.

Here is Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald on a Feb-26 The Compound podcast, again, detailing how the economics for AV delivery are actually already cheaper than the human courier equivalent for certain deliveries:

“On the delivery side, what I’d say is interesting and not well understood is the unit economics already work. Our cost per trip for some of our Serve deliveries [using AVs from Serve Robotics], for example, in markets like Los Angeles are already cheaper on certain deliveries than the human courier equivalent. And I think that’s going to be really exciting both for our company, but also for consumers who can save money.”

In the world of mid-range delivery bots, DoorDash seems to be leading the way with its “Dot” vehicle. The company unveiled Dot in Sep-25, and it is currently making deliveries in Phoenix, like this one:

Ronald van Loon@Ronald_vanLoon

DoorDash Unveils “Dot” — Its New #Autonomous Delivery #Robot Aiming for Global Scale by @WallStreetApes #SupplyChain #Robotics #Engineering #Innovation #Technology

10:16 PM · Jun 12, 2026 · 1.02K Views

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2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 10 Likes

Dot is roughly a tenth the size of a car, at less than 5 feet tall and 3 feet wide. It is 350 pounds and can travel up to 20 MPH on streets or in bike lanes. It can fit six pizza boxes or up to 30 pounds of food.

Nuro — yes the same Nuro that is rolling out mobility AVs in partnership Uber — was actually working on a similar vehicle, pictured below.

The company eventually pivoted away from a strategy of selling full-stack delivery vehicles (to its current strategy of licensing AV mobility software). As a result, this vehicle is no longer in development. However, undoubtedly other providers will step in to fill this opportunity space should it prove to be a valuable one.

Overall, the opportunity for disruption in delivery through AVs seems lower than in mobility over the medium term: (1) there is less focus on it from the likes of Waymo, Tesla, etc. (for now), (2) there is no Tesla equivalent that already manufactures these delivery AVs at massive scale today, (3) even if there were, in order to provide a holistic delivery offering (and compete with Uber Eats/DoorDash), a provider would need to amalgamate different AV form factors (drone, sidewalk and mid-range), (4) the “last mile problem” as discussed earlier, (5) a robust 1P app is harder to build in delivery due to the huge number of merchants you’ll have to onboard, and (6) as previously mentioned, these delivery networks run at razor-thin margins (and actually make most of their money on advertising, which only makes sense to offer once you reach a very large scale).

However, AVs do still seem to open the door for someone like Amazon or potentially Waymo to compete, as they obviate the need to build a supply of human couriers, which was arguably the largest barrier to entry.

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Freight

Unbeknownst to some, Uber actually has a “Freight” division. You can think of it kind of like “Uber for trucking.” Uber Freight matches shippers (companies that need to ship things) with carriers (trucking companies and independent truckers).

Uber Freight was established in ~2017, and in 2025 it generated ~$5.1bn in bookings (or ~2.5% of Uber’s total bookings). Growth has been flat the last couple of years, and the segment operates around breakeven. Because Uber Freight’s revenue is booked on a gross basis (i.e. the amount it charges shippers, not the difference between what it charges shippers and pays out to carriers — or what would be “net” revenue), it also reports a revenue figure of ~$5.1bn. This revenue figure is not “apples-to-apples” with the rest of Uber’s business, where revenue is almost entirely presented on a “net” basis.

Uber Freight initially operated solely within the “brokerage” or “spot market” segment of the freight market. This represents about ~20-25% of the market. ~40-50% of the market consists of “private fleets,” or fleets owned by the companies that are doing the shipping (e.g. Walmart, Pepsi, Sysco). The other ~30% of the market is where mostly large shippers (e.g. Target) sign longer-term contracts with mostly larger trucking companies (e.g. J.B. Hunt, Knight-Swift) for more regular shipping needs.

The broker share of the market has actually increased from ~10% to ~20-25% over the last ~25 years. As the ease of booking shipment through brokers has increased, it has led to smaller shippers increasingly ditching their fleets. Also the carrier base has continued to fragment — there are over 900k trucking companies in the US, and 95% of them operate 10 or fewer trucks.

Uber, not surprisingly, took the approach of offering a highly “digitally native” freight brokerage experience. Instead of negotiating rates by phone which is what a traditional broker might have done, Uber provided instant quotes. If a shipper accepted an Uber quote, and Uber ultimately couldn’t find a carrier to fulfill the shipment at a profitable rate, Uber simply lost money on the transaction. Additionally, Uber Freight plugs right into a shipper’s ERP system. Uber also provided “Uber-style” visibility into where shipments were at any given point in time.

With Uber’s acquisition of Transplace in 2021, Uber broadened its Freight offering beyond the brokerage market. Transplace, which Uber acquired for $2.25bn, was a leading software and managed services provider operating something like a fully outsourced logistics provider for shippers (sometimes called a “4PL”). The company was formed in 2000 when six leading trucking companies (JB Hunt, MS Carriers, Swift Transportation, Werner Enterprises, Covenant Transport and US Xpress) merged (and spun out) their logistics arms.

Transplace’s software platform offered shippers sophisticated supply chain planning, shipping optimization and day-to-day execution. From Uber’s Transplace M&A deck:

At the time of the acquisition, Transplace was doing ~$100m of EBITDA and growing ~15% YoY. It claimed gross retention of 96%, an average customer tenure of ~8-9 years and an average contract length of ~3-5 years.

While Uber has failed to grow the business much in recent years, they remain committed to it for now. Here is Dara from a Mar-26 Semafor podcast:

DK: “I view freight as our first shot at getting into the end-to-end logistics business. You know, what we do with Uber Eats to some extent, we’re doing on-demand, local, last mile logistics. One thing you may or may not know about Eats is, if for example you order an Apple iPhone [through Apple directly], you can get it delivered to your home and that’s an Uber Eats courier who goes and picks it up from the store and [delivers it]. So to some extent we’re already doing third-party last mile delivery.

What freight represents is first mile delivery. Right from the factory to the warehouse. And then there’s this middle mile that we haven’t penetrated yet. Our vision is to build an end-to-end on-demand, next generation logistics network powered partially by truckers moving from factories to warehouses, smaller trucks from the warehouse to the store and ultimately individual consumers from the store to the end consumer.

We’re the only company that’s taking it on. Freight is part of that ecosystem that we’re putting together. It’s a big challenge, but an enormous opportunity for us to build that end-to-end logistics stack, and it’s something I’m really, really excited about.”

Interviewer: “Sounds like you’re firmly committed to it.”

DK: “Oh, yeah.”

My expectation would be that Uber sees AI and autonomous trucking as potential wedges to grow share. AI is a technology that could meaningfully improve its managed services and brokerage offerings (e.g. help reduce costs for shippers, reduce downtime for carriers). Also Uber seems highly focused on securing driverless trucking capacity for its brokerage and managed services offerings. Uber has made meaningful investments in Aurora and Waabi, two leading AV tech providers in the trucking space.

I’m not ascribing any value to Uber Freight at this point. It hasn’t grown in 3 years, it isn’t profitable, it doesn’t seem to enjoy much in the way of synergies with the rest of Uber (at this point at least), and it’s unclear to me if it has much of a moat.

Further, in May-26 Amazon introduced Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS), opening up Amazon’s logistics network to any business (with core offerings including freight, distribution & fulfillment and parcel shipping):

My guess is that this was not a great development for Uber Freight. This seems like potentially the type of solution Uber was ultimately going for (and more).

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Valuation

Multiples

Uber currently trades for ~12x ‘27e EBIT and ~10x ‘27e EBITDA, pro forma for the impact of Delivery Hero.

Note that the non-GAAP EBIT figures above deduct SBC. The non-GAAP EBITDA figures do not, however. I’m not showing a FCF multiple because, as discussed earlier, Uber’s captive insurer inflates its traditional FCF metric (OCF - Capex).

My EBIT figures may prove to be a bit aggressive (they imply EBIT growth of 40% and 28% in ‘26 and ‘27, respectively, for Uber’s legacy business). However, I wouldn’t expect them to be wildly off the mark — EBIT grew 50% in ‘25 and 42% in Q1’26.

Comps

Below are a selection of comps for Uber, showing certain trading and operational metrics.

Note that the Uber numbers above are not adjusted for Delivery Hero.

Looking at EV / ‘26 EBITDA, it’s interesting that Uber doesn’t trade at any type of premium to its comp set. DoorDash specifically trades at a large premium to Uber (~24x vs. ~14x). Much of the difference is perhaps attributable to (1) less perceived AV risk for DoorDash and (2) DoorDash’s higher recent growth (in bookings and users).

Also interesting is the delta in monthly active users between Uber and DoorDash. Uber has ~202mm monthly actives vs. DoorDash with just ~56mm. ~63% of DoorDash’s monthly actives are already DashPass members. For Uber, the figure is just ~23%. Also DoorDash generates almost twice the annual GMV per monthly active (~$1,822) vs. Uber (~$958). This seems to suggest that Uber has more opportunity to penetrate its existing user base. DoorDash’s numbers are skewed by being US centric vs. Uber’s which include more developing regions such as India and Brazil.

Uber’s reported take rate in delivery is ~19% vs. DoorDash at just ~13%. This would seem like a somewhat precarious position for Uber, reminiscent of Expedia vs. Booking.com. Booking, with a lower take rate and focus on building supply, blew past Expedia which held take rates higher and focused on building demand (a story Dara knows well). However, the delta is not as bad as it looks because (1) Uber is generating more ad revenue as a percentage of total bookings than DoorDash and (2) DoorDash’s bookings figure includes tips and Uber’s does not. Both factors inflate Uber’s take rate vs. DoorDash.

Grab is perhaps the most comparable business to Uber as it has both a mobility business and a delivery business. Grab trades at a much lower GMV multiple than Uber (~0.48x vs. ~0.79x). However they trade in line on revenue and EBITDA. Grab is showing very low take rates in both mobility (~15%) and delivery (~13%).

It should be noted that Grab is projecting $1.5BN of EBITDA in 2028, and it trades for just ~7x that figure. Rumors that Meituan, the largest food delivery player in China, could be entering SE Asia combined with competition from Shopee (the largest ecommerce platform in SE Asia who has launched food delivery) seems to be keeping a (perhaps well-deserved) cap on the multiple. Grab, however, is also much less at risk from AVs. AVs are much further away from being comparable on a price per mile basis to human drivers in the very cheap SE Asia region, where Grab operates exclusively.

M&A Comps

Below are a selection of M&A comps.

The median delivery GMV multiple is around ~0.50x trailing.

Uber paid just 0.43x GMV and ~8x EBITDA for Delivery Hero, a delivery business many times larger than every other comp in the set (other than JET).

Simple “Gut-Check” Model

If we assume:

• ~15% total bookings CAGR through 2032

  • Mobility bookings was 20% in Q1’26 on a CC basis (ex DH)

  • Delivery bookings was 23% in Q1’26 on a CC basis (ex DH)

• EBITDA as a % of GMV grows from ~4.7% in 2025 (pro forma for DH) to 6.50% in 2031

• Uber keeps 30% of the EBITDA it generates as cash to the balance sheet

• A 12x LTM EBITDA multiple

This results in a ~3.0x MOIC and a ~20% IRR over 6 years.

This assumes everything more-or-less goes according to plan. In theory, it gives investors a healthy margin of safety to work with.

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Management + Ownership

Leadership

Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO, 56 YO)

Dara has been the CEO of Uber since 2017.

He was previously the CEO of Expedia from 2005 to 2017, and before that the CFO of IAC Travel. Before joining IAC, Dara served as a VP at Allen & Company, a firm he joined as an analyst.

Dara had the good fortune of serving at IAC/Expedia under the leadership of Barry Diller. Dara met Barry while at Allen & Co. Over time, Dara became one of Barry’s go-to bankers as Barry built up IAC through acquisition (and pivoted from a focus on cable TV networks to internet properties). Dara eventually joined IAC as Barry’s “deal guy,” before eventually taking the reins at Expedia (which IAC spun out in 2005 as a standalone, publicly traded company).

At Expedia, Dara was apparently named one of the Highest Rated CEOs on Glassdoor. He still serves on the Board of Expedia and he was previously on the board of the New York Times Company.

Dara was originally born in Iran. He left the country with his family during the Iranian Revolution when he was 9 years old. His family eventually settled in Tarrytown, New York. Dara earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Brown University.

Dara’s a likable, self-proclaimed “consensus-builder” type. He strikes me as high quality manager with a strong strategic sense. Interestingly, he’s not only a second-time CEO, but a second-time marketplace CEO. I believe this has its benefits.

Clearly something that was seared into Dara’s brain from his time at Expedia was (1) the power of keeping take rates low and (2) the importance of being a “supply-led” marketplace. While Expedia had a good run under Dara’s leadership, it’s main competitor — Booking.com — did much better. Booking.com overtook Expedia during this period and now boasts a market cap of ~$130bn (vs. Expedia’s of ~$30bn). When Dara took over at Expedia, it had a “demand-led” approach, advertising heavily to build demand while maintaining a premium “take rate.” Booking.com, in contrast, kept take rates lower while focusing on building best-in-class hotel inventory supply.

Dara on his lessons from competing against Booking.com from a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast:

Interviewer: “If we look at the Expedia story…I would say elephant in the room is the whole Booking[.com] situation, how that evolved. Now with the benefit of hindsight maybe explain what happened, what is your version of why Booking is where it is versus Expedia?”

DK: “Yeah definitely, painful story. And you know, during my years both companies did well but Booking did better. I think two lessons there.

One is that if you’re building an aggregation platform, supply is king. Expedia, Hotels.com built more — it was more about audience. “Hey, how do I build audience, how do I build a brand and then if I build an audience and a brand, what supply can I bring on board to fulfill that demand? Booking.com started with supply first. Which is, ‘Hey, I’m just going to go out and add every single hotel in a particular marketplace and each hotel is another opportunity to sell to a new audience.’ And if Expedia had 50 hotels in a market and if Booking.com had 200 hotels in a market, that market would convert better for Booking.com than Expedia. So supply, you know, running a supply business was a lesson for me.

And the second was actually starting from a low margin position. Expedia, at the time when I joined, had a take rate of about 30%. Booking.com had a take rate of 15%. We thought 30% was better because we could make more money per transaction, we could put that money into advertising, build more audience. And we would beat Booking.com at the audience game. But what Booking got right was, because they were charging 15%, they were able to sign up more supply, and again, supply brought them audience.

So the two lessons are, one is start from a low margin position and build up your margins over time and they have at Expedia. We had to reduce our margins over a period of time. And then second is supply is king…I think in hindsight we got the supply memo a bit too late, a couple of years too late. And then once we started organizing against it, we had a great five, six year run against Booking.com and Priceline.

The toughest part was actually the margins. Taking down [take rates] from 30% to 15%. Literally cutting your revenue as a public company, incredibly painful…You can identify what you’re losing, which is a huge amount of profitability when you cut margins. You can’t identify what you’re gaining. You know, a supplier may be a little bit less angry at you, for example. It’s just hard to identify the return from cutting your margins. And that was again 6, 7-year journey that we went through cutting revenue margin, cutting revenue margin, that was really painful as a public company. But we had to do it. In hindsight, I wish we had done it faster.”

On many occasions Dara has stressed the importance of keeping take rates low.⁶³⁶⁴ Here is Dara on the dangers of raising take rates, from a Jun-23 Acquired podcast:

“High take rates are dangerous. Our job as a company is to grow volume as much as we can as fast as we can and make our shareholders happy enough, minimizing the take rate. Taking as much of that dollar and and giving it to drivers and couriers. Last quarter, gross bookings grew over 22% or so which is really good. The money that drivers and couriers, including tips, made on the platform grew by 30%. And at the same time we were able to expand our margins…Sometimes it is torture. Watch every single nickel and dime. Be incredibly efficient in everything that you do. Automate everything. Get fraud out of the system, etc. So that you can actually operate a business at scale at the lowest take rate possible. Talking about Booking.com…when I started at Expedia — Expedia’s take rate was 25 percent and Bookings’ take rate was 15. And over torturous 13 years we took Expedia’s take rate from 25 to the teens — it was like 17 or so when I left. And those are like pure margin dollars that you’re taking out. Like there’s no goodness that comes out of it and so it’s just really hard work to do…

You don’t want to put yourself in that position. It’s very tempting. It’s very, very easy. This is the temptation. Obviously this quarterly treadmill that you’re on, etc. You can make someone happy by increasing take rate and throwing it to the bottom line and we really, really culturally try to resist that notion.”

Overall, Dara and team have a “shared-savings” bent in how they are positioning the business, which strikes me as a strong positive. Uber is using its scale to reduce costs for the consumer. Here is Dara from a Mar-25 Morgan Stanley conference:

“So I think the team, first of all, is executing really well. But the biggest area that I believe we should do better at is just cost, right?…

Building out a true low-cost product, shared product, getting 2 or 3 people into a car is a very significant challenge in -- operationally, algorithmically. We’re making progress there. So I’m happy about the progress there, but this is -- I think we will be possibly the only company in the world that’s going to solve this at scale. To be clear, we’re losing money in share, but the loss rates are coming down. The efficiencies continue to increase, and I’m quite confident of the activity of that team.

When you look at Uber Eats, for example, we are -- one of our biggest programs is what we call merchant-funded offers. So actually, merchants providing buy one, get one free, if you spend $30 on a basket, gets a $10 item for free, et cetera. These are promotions that these merchants run. Those promotions give merchants more access to our audience, and merchant-funded offers are now running at over $1 billion of, call it, savings for our eaters per year as well.

And then, of course, for us, the membership program is a giant discount program, so to speak. We’re trading higher frequency, higher reliability for discounts to our consumers as well. It is absolutely working. But near term, to be clear, membership is an investment, right? So the discounts come through before the frequency increases come through, the retention comes through. But we’re now seeing memberships. One of the reasons why you’re seeing Uber Eats growth rate actually accelerate in addition to the newer businesses like grocery, et cetera, is that you’re seeing the frequency and the retention from our membership program come into play as the cohorts mature as well.

So for us, just pricing to the end consumer is an area of real focus for us. And I’d like to be making more progress there than we have been in the past couple of years.”

This type of long-term mentality and stewardship is good to see.

Dara seemingly has an almost ideal background for his current role. He has an engineering degree, but also a great deal of finance expertise (banking at Allen & Co, former CFO of IAC Travel). He has extensive M&A experience, which mostly came under the tutelage of famed dealmaker Barry Diller. This experience is coming in especially handy as Uber cuts a myriad of deals across the AV landscape (in addition to other M&A). Dara also has extensive public CEO experience from his time at Expedia (which is also a marketplace, like Uber), where he also replaced a founder-CEO in Rich Barton.

Track Record

Overall, I’d say Uber has executed well since Dara took the reins in 2017. He was taking over a business that was well-positioned, of course. But nonetheless, I think he’s put up a very solid track record.

Since 2017, Revenue has almost 7x’d, a 27% CAGR. Meanwhile, the profitability of the business has inflected majorly. From -$2.6bn in adj EBITDA in 2017, the company generated $8.7bn of adj EBITDA in 2025. In Q1’26, GB grew by 21% (on a CC basis) and the company generated $1.9bn of GAAP EBIT (~15% of rev).

The team has expanded Uber’s products and geos served in sensible ways. For example, Uber introduced new products like “Reserve,” “Wait & Save,” Uber for Business (U4B), Uber Teens, and Moto (in developing countries). These products are growing significantly faster than the core business. For example, U4B is growing more than twice as fast as mobility overall.⁶⁵ Uber has expanded into grocery, retail and direct on the delivery side. They’ve continued to enter additional countries where it made sense (such as South Korea, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Argentina, which are some of their fastest growing markets today). They’ve quickly grown a large advertising business, which has transformed the profitability of Uber’s delivery segment.

Dara has also overseen the divestments of a number of highly cash-burning segments with murky futures. These included the divestments of (1) Uber’s SE Asia business, (2) Uber Eats India, (3) Uber Elevate (it’s air taxi technology division), and (4) ATG (it’s self-driving tech division). Before Dara joined, the company also divested its China business and its Russia business. Many of these exited markets are notoriously competitive, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that, had Uber stayed, it might still be slugging it out today with various competitors in these regions. Altogether, these moves have contributed to a much healthier level of profitability for Uber.

Perhaps the most controversial of its divestments was that of the ATG division, or its self-driving tech division. There were a number of reasons why Uber elected to divest it, including: (1) the segment was burning a lot of cash (and Uber needed to cut costs, especially in the early COVID period), (2) safety concerns/risk (one of Uber’s self-driving test vehicles hit and killed a pedestrian in 2018), (3) by not having its own self-driving tech (i.e. being a neutral third party), Uber was better positioned to work with almost every other AV provider in the ecosystem, and (4) perhaps most importantly, Uber viewed its core strength as its marketplace business and technology (not cutting edge AV technology), and that it was best for Uber to focus on its core competencies.

Here is Dara from a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast explaining the decision to cut the ATG segment:

“We cut back on AV during COVID, which was an emergency for the company. We went from losing two billion to losing three and a half billion or so. And we only had so much time to get to profitability. We were going to run out of cash. So there was a necessity there to some extent. But the other factor for me is that companies have cores that they’re great at and we were a software company. We’re great at building algorithms, building search, matching, etc. We weren’t a great hardware company and hardware is really tough. The cycles are different. It’s multi-year cycles versus you know multi-week cycles, so to speak, which is how we operate. So I kind of concluded that it wasn’t something that we were truly going to be great at. There was a set of companies that were just working on AV and it was life or death for them. For us it was important but it was a little bit of a side project. And then the necessity of it forced us to get out.

The other element that was really important to me was that because we were building our own AV, no one else in the ecosystem wanted to work with us because they were competitive with us. And so our hypothesis was that AV was not going to be winner take all. There are going to be multiple players who were going to win. And in order to play with the greatest talent base in the ecosystem, we needed to become a neutral party and that we would actually go and actively fund the ecosystem and build up the ecosystem. And help the ecosystem grow versus trying to build our own competitor. So I think it’s the right decision, but time will tell.”

Uber also sold off this division in the “pre-AI” era. Self-driving was a much harder problem to solve in the pre-AI era as, according to my understanding, you basically had to program in rules/logic for driving and to solve edge cases (yikes) vs. “just” using an end-to-end neural net. So this would have made the decision easier.

Regardless, I think the decision to sell was probably the right one for the reasons listed above. This is not to mention that getting the business to a very profitable state unlocked for Uber the ability to secure AV supply for their platform. Getting the business to a very profitable state, in fact, may arguably have been much more important in contributing to Uber’s AV capabilities than anything else.

Bill Gurley would tell you Uber should have taken its self-driving tech and kick-started an open source project (vs. selling it). I’m not one to argue with Bill Gurley, so perhaps that was a miss. From a Feb-26 Stratechery interview:

BT: “Do you have any takes on Uber versus autonomous vehicles? Are they going to be okay?”

BG: “Well, I will give you one take. I have been pushing the company for over 10 years to embrace open source and I think it would’ve been the best thing they could have possibly done. They took the assets they had at the time and sold them into, I can’t even remember the name of the company, and they gave that company money and so if that IP had instead kick-started an open source project.”

BT: “They’d have way more potential suppliers.”

BG: “Yeah, and you commoditize that layer. Part of what we’re seeing in this AI war, and Google got really good at this not only with Android but Kubernetes, like you use open source to commoditize another layer so that your layer is protected as much as possible.”

I think we are sort of getting open-source technology anyway via NVIDIA, however, so perhaps it won’t make a big difference in the end.

I’d probably characterize the team’s M&A track record as “okay.” Uber paid $7bn+ for Cornershop, Postmates and Drizly, which were perhaps overpays but helped Uber kickstart its delivery business in the immediate COVID aftermath. It paid $3.1bn for Careem, which helped cement Uber’s rideshare leadership in the Middle East (this did not translate to delivery, however — talabat and HungerStation dominate the Middle East in delivery). Uber’s most recent acquisitions have been sensible looking tuck-ins: Foodpanda Taiwan (was ultimately blocked), Trendyol GO, Getir’s food delivery biz, SpotHero and Blacklane. Perhaps its most clear miss was paying $2.25bn for Transplace, which doesn’t seem like a long-term winner at this point (Uber Freight is currently ex growth and unprofitable). Most recently, in Jul-26, Uber acquired Delivery Hero for ~$18bn, a deal I like for Uber as discussed previously.

Another area in which you could potentially knock management is their relative tardiness in going after the suburbs, particularly on the delivery side. This opened the door for DoorDash to entrench itself. Uber is now attempting to compete more aggressively in the suburbs, but DoorDash is quite formidable at this point.

Something Uber has done well, and that should greatly assist Uber in the suburbs, is going all in on Uber One. They have smartly priced the membership at the same level of DashPass while bundling in more rewards than anybody else (it seems clearly the superior membership to have in the delivery/mobility world). It’s a “shared-savings” approach, leveraging Uber’s scale and breadth of offerings. I like how they are recycling most/all of the dollars they are generating through their new partnership with Expedia towards additional benefits for Uber One members. I like how they intend to offer additional parking-related benefits for Uber One members by way of their acquisition of SpotHero. They are creating an all-things transportation bundle that has real attractiveness. Even if Uber never makes a profit from hotels for example, these types of moves increase the attractiveness of Uber One, which will feed Uber’s mobility and delivery businesses.

In terms of the autonomous transition, Uber is clearly trying to be on its front foot. I like that they’ve been aggressive using their balance sheet to secure AVs for the Uber platform. Uber Autonomous Solutions was an important step and builds nicely on Uber’s existing capabilities. I agree with the thought that AV fleets will mostly be “financial-ized” at some point, and that remaining an asset-light platform is the ideal future course.

One thing that stands out very positively, inspired by this tweet from K Capital, is Uber’s pace of execution. All of the following things have happened since just February: (1) reported 21% bookings growth (on a CC basis) and nearly ~$2bn of GAAP EBIT in Q1’26, (2) acquired SpotHero, (3) acquired Blacklane, (4) acquired Getir’s delivery business in Turkey, (5) made a highly complex “carve-out” acquisition of Delivery Hero (and executed on a series of machinations to build a stake in the business prior to the deal), (6) expanded its stake in WeRide, (6) unveiled Uber Autonomous Solutions, (7) launched Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb in partnership with Pony.ai, (8) participated in Wayve’s $1.5bn Series D, (9) made a $300m investment into Rivian and committed to buying between 10-40k R2 robotaxis, (10) made a $200m additional investment in Lucid while upp’ing its vehicle commitment from 20k to 35k, (11) announced a partnership with NVIDIA to launch robotaxis in 28 cities by 2028, (11) partnered with Hertz to power fleet management for Uber’s upcoming launch of Nuro/Lucid robotaxis in the SF Bay Area (13) unveiled hotel bookings through the Uber app in partnership with Expedia, (12) announced additional partnerships with Joby Aviation, Baidu, WeRide, Zoox, Motional, MOIA, Wayve and (14) are infusing AI-driven efficiencies throughout its business functions. This ability to do many things well at once surely is a positive indicator in terms of management quality.

Overall, Dara & team strike me as a good stewards of the business. They’ve transformed the profitability of the business, while maintaining very healthy growth. They’re working hard to be on front lines of autonomy. They’re working hard on making the Uber One membership as attractive and sticky as possible. I feel pretty confident they will allocate capital at least reasonably wisely.

Broader Management Team

The broader management team seems pretty good on the whole.

• Andrew Macdonald (President & COO, 41 YO). Andrew was appointed President and COO in Jun-25. He previously served as Head of Global Mobility from 2019 to 2025, and held various general management and regional leadership roles at Uber from 2012 to 2019. Prior to Uber, he was a consultant at Bain & Co from 2007 to 2010 and later co-founded multiple early-stage private companies. In this interview on The Compound podcast, I thought he squeezed in a large number of insights into just 30 min.

• Balaji Krishnamurthy (CFO, 41 YO). Balaji was recently appointed CFO in Feb-26. He previously served as VP, Strategic Finance from 2023 to 2026, and Head of Investor Relations from 2020 to 2023. Prior to joining Uber, he was VP of Equity Research, US Hardware and Communications Technology at Goldman Sachs, from 2011 to 2019. I’ve enjoyed Balaji’s commentary on recent earnings calls

• Sachin Kansal (Chief Product Officer, ~47 YO). Sachin is responsible for the company’s Mobility and Delivery products, overseeing product management, design, and product operations. He also oversees product and technology strategy for some of Uber’s new initiatives such as autonomous vehicles, sustainability, taxis, and Uber for Teens. He joined Uber in 2017 as the company’s first product leader focused on safety technology. Sachin was previously the VP of Product at Lookout, a leading mobile security company, where he managed their Consumer product line and scaled the business to 120M+ users. Before that, Sachin served as Chief Product Officer at Flywheel Software, a provider of on-demand transportation through taxicabs. He spent the early part of his career at Palm (acquired by HP), where he was the Director of Product Management focused on Palm’s mobile operating system webOS and mobile applications. This WSJ interview from Sachin is a good listen, and I’ve also enjoyed his appearances in Uber’s “Go-Get” annual product showcases.

• Jill Hazelbaker (Chief Marketing Officer, 44 YO). Jill has served as CMO and SVP, Public Affairs since 2019. She was SVP/VP, Communications and Public Policy from 2015 to 2019. Prior to Uber, she was VP, Communications and Public Policy of Snap Inc. from 2014 to 2015. From 2010 until 2014, she held senior communications and public policy roles at Google. Prior to joining Google, she served as Press Secretary to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign in New York City in 2009 and as the Communications Director for Senator John McCain’s U.S. presidential campaign from 2007 to 2008.

• Tony West (SVP, Chief Legal Officer, 60 YO). Tony has served as SVP, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary since 2017. Prior to joining Uber, he was EVP, Government Affairs, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary from 2014 to 2017 at PepsiCo. Prior to PepsiCo, he served as the 17th Associate Attorney General of the US from 2012 to 2014, after previously serving as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2009 to 2012. From 2001 to 2009, he was a partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP.

Board of Directors

• Ron Sugar (Chairman, 77 YO). Ron has served as the Independent Chairperson of the Board since 2018. He was Chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman, a global aerospace and defense company, from 2003 until his retirement in 2010, and President and COO from 2001 to 2003. He was President and COO of Litton Industries, Inc. from 2000 until the company was acquired by Northrop Grumman Corporation in 2001. Prior to that time, he served as CFO of TRW Inc. He is an adviser to Bain & Co and was formerly an adviser to Ares Management and to Singapore’s Temasek Investment Company. He is a trustee of the University of Southern California, board of visitors member of the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management, past Chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Sugar currently serves on the board of Apple. He previously served on the board of Air Lease Corporation from 2010 to 2020, the board of Chevron from 2005 to 2023, and the board of Amgen from 2010 to 2024. Ron and Dara have a standing weekly hour-long call primarily focused on longer-term strategic direction and goals.

• Revathi Advaithi (58 YO). Revathi has served on the Board since 2020. She has been CEO of Flex Ltd., the third largest EMS provider in the world, since 2019. Prior to Flex, she was President and COO, Electrical Sector, of Eaton Corporation plc, a power management company, from 2015 to 2019. Prior to that role, she held senior management roles at Eaton from 2008 to 2015. Between 2002 and 2008, she worked at Honeywell, where she held several senior roles within the sourcing and supply chain functions of the aerospace sector before being named Vice President and General Manager of Honeywell’s Field Solutions business in 2006. She held various other roles at Eaton between 1995 and 2002.

• Turqi Alnowaiser (49 YO). Turqi has served on the Board since 2023. He has served as Deputy Governor and Head of the International Investments Division at The Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, since 2021, and previously served as Head of International Investments at The Public Investment Fund from 2016 to 2021. He formerly held several executive roles at Saudi Fransi Capital, a leading financial services firm based in Saudi Arabia, including as Head of Asset Management. Before his career at Saudi Fransi Capital, he specialized in developing, managing, and regulating various financial products across asset classes at Morgan Stanley, the Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi Industrial Development Fund. He has served on the board of Lucid Group since 2019 and on the board of Hapag-Lloyd AG since 2018.

• Nikesh Arora (58 YO). Nikesh has served on the Board since 2025. He has served as the Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, a leading global cybersecurity company, since 2018. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, from 2016 through 2018, he was an angel investor and from 2016 through 2017, he served as an advisor to SoftBank. From 2015 through 2016, he served as President and COO of SoftBank and from 2014 through 2015, he served as vice chair and CEO of SoftBank Internet and Media. Prior to SoftBank, from 2004 through 2014, he held multiple senior leadership operating roles at Google, Inc., including serving as SVP and Chief Business Officer, from 2011 to 2014. He also serves on the board of Compagnie Financiere Richemont S.A., a public Switzerland-based luxury goods holding company. He previously served on the boards of SoftBank, Sprint Corp., Colgate-Palmolive Company, and Yahoo! Japan, among others.

• Ursula Burns (67 YO). Ursula has served on the Board since 2017. In 2021, she co-founded Integrum Holdings, an investment firm focused on partnering with technology-enabled services companies. Previously, she was Chairman of VEON Ltd., an international telecommunications and technology company, from 2017 to 2020 and CEO from 2018 to 2020. She was Chairman of Xerox Corporation from 2009 to 2017 and CEO from 2009 to 2016, prior to which she advanced through many engineering and management positions after joining the company in 1980. She currently serves on the boards of IHS Holding Limited and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. She previously served on the boards of Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc. from 2021 to 2025, American Express from 2004 to 2018, Nestlé S.A. from 2017 to 2021, and Exxon Mobil Corporation from 2012 to 2023.

• Robert Eckert (71 YO). Rober has served on the Board since 2020. He has been an Operating Partner of FFL Partners, a private equity firm, since 2014. He is also Chairman Emeritus of Mattel, a role he has held since 2013. He was Mattel’s Chairman and CEO from 2000 until 2011, and he continued to serve as its Chairman until 2012. He previously worked for Kraft Foods, Inc. for 23 years, and served as President and CEO from 1997 until 2000. From 1995 to 1997, Mr. Eckert was Group VP of Kraft Foods, and from 1993 to 1995, he was President of the Oscar Mayer foods division of Kraft Foods. Mr. Eckert currently serves on the boards of Amgen, Levi Strauss & Co., and Quinn Company. He previously served on the board of McDonald’s from 2003 to 2023.

• Amanda Ginsberg (56 YO). Amanda has served on the Board since 2020. She has been an Operating Partner of Advent International, a global private equity investor, since 2022. She was CEO of Match Group from 2017 to 2020. Prior to this role, she was CEO of Match Group Americas from 2015 to 2017, where she was responsible for the Match U.S. brand, Match Affinity Brands, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, ParPerfeito, and overall North and South American expansion. Previously, she was the CEO of The Princeton Review from 2014 to 2015, where she expanded its services to include online services, including tutoring and college counseling. She currently serves on the board of ThredUp Inc. and the board of Universal Music Group. She previously served on the boards of Care.com from 2012 to 2014; J.C. Penney from 2015 to 2020; Match Group from 2017 to 2020; and Z-Work Acquisition Corp. from 2020 to 2022.

• John Thain (70 YO). John has served on the Board since 2017. He is the Founding Partner of Pine Island Capital Partners, a private investment firm, and has served as Chairman since 2017. He was Chairman and CEO of CIT Group from 2010 until 2016. In 2009, prior to joining CIT Group, he was President of Global Banking, Securities and Wealth Management for Bank of America. From 2007 to 2009, prior to its merger with Bank of America, Mr. Thain was Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co. From 2006 to 2007, he was CEO and a director of NYSE Euronext, Inc. following the NYSE Group and Euronext N.V. merger. He joined the New York Stock Exchange in 2004, serving as CEO and a director. From 2003 through 2004, Mr. Thain was the President and COO of Goldman Sachs, and from 1999 through 2003 he was President and Co-Chief Operating Officer. From 1994 to 1999, he was CFO and Head of Operations, Technology and Finance, and from 1995 to 1997 he was also Co-Chief Executive Officer for European operations for Goldman Sachs. He currently serves on the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank AG. He previously served on the board of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. from 1998 to 2004.

• Alexander Wynaendts (65 YO). Alexander has served on the Board since 2021. From 2008 to 2020, he was CEO and Chairman of the management and executive boards of Aegon NV, one of the world’s leading providers of life insurance, pensions, and asset management. Prior to Aegon, Alexander began his career in 1984 with ABN AMRO Bank, working in Amsterdam and London in the Dutch bank’s capital markets, asset management, corporate finance, and private banking operations. He currently serves on the board of Air France-KLM SA and the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG, where he serves as Chairman. He formerly served on the board of Citigroup Inc. from 2016 to 2021.

Notable Departures

• Travis Kalanick & other early employees (Garrett Camp, Ryan Graves, Emil Michael, etc.). Kalanick is now CEO of Atoms, a robotics company focused on food, mining and transportation.

• Sundeep Jain. Former Chief Product Officer and SVP Engineering from 2018-2024. Now President of Mercor.

• Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty. Former SVP of Uber Eats from 2021-2025. Joined Uber in 2012. Now GP at VC firm Plural.

• Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah. Former CFO from 2023-2026. Now a Senior Policy Advisor at the US Department of Commerce. Member of the Board at Shopify.

• Nelson Chai. Former CFO from 2018-2024. Now CEO of DailyPay. Member of the Board at Chubb, Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Uber Culture

Uber culture has been the topic of much discussion over the years.

In the early days it was pretty toxic, I think it’s fair to say. Hard-working, but also very much “kill or be killed.” Sharp elbows and stepping on toes were encouraged. HR complaints were not followed up on. Misogynistic behavior festered. Borderline illegal competitive behavior was encouraged. This “win at all costs” culture helped power Uber to great heights as the undisputed global leader in the industry, but it also caused a self-implosion.

With the appointment of Dara as CEO, amongst other things, the Board sought something of a cultural reset. Here are Uber’s official values today:

From interviews, it seems Dara, after joining, tried his best to retain Uber’s hard-working culture. He takes pride in it. He seems fairly unafraid to “push out” those that aren’t willing to put in the hours. From a Feb-26 DOAC podcast:

“So part of working hard is like, you know, sending emails to the team on a Saturday and if I don’t get a response on Saturday, sending them an email on Sunday with a question mark. ‘What’s going on?’

You know, I think at Expedia in hindsight — we worked intensely and we went hard, but but not as hard as I like. Because Expedia was, we were selling vacations, right? The product that we were selling was about turning yourself off. And so we did talk about work-life balance. And in hindsight, at Uber, I don’t.

You come to Uber, you’re going to work your ass off. We’re going to be really demanding. If you’re not performing, we’re going to let you know. And if you don’t fix it, we’re going to push you out.

But while it will be incredibly hard, you will have real agency at the company. We’re a big company, but individuals can make a big difference. And it’s a company that’s making a difference in the world. You’re going to learn so much. And while you will have worked hard, you’re going to have a great time. But this is, don’t come here if you want to coast. And I’m very clear about that. And I should have been more clear at Expedia.”

He’s also tried to retain a culture that encourages disagreement and debate (but where taking that too far, or “being an asshole,” is not). He seeks out truth tellers⁶⁶, and tries to lead by example along that dimension. He’s candid in interviews almost to a fault.

Uber’s Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal espouses a deep understanding of the customer (both quantitatively and qualitatively, including frequently dogfooding the product) and shipping quickly (or as he calls it, “ship, ship, ship”).

Glassdoor has Uber rated a 3.7/5.0 on 16,151 reviews (though many of which are from drivers/couriers). 71% “approve” of Dara. Only 53% have a “positive business outlook.”

My sense is that, for the right person, Uber can still be a very exciting place to work. Millions of people use the product in everyday life all across the globe. Navigating the autonomous transition is interesting, challenging, and offers the prospect of large future rewards. There are difficult technical challenges to solve. And it’s still a magical product in many ways.

Ownership

Management and director ownership is quite low on a percentage basis, which is not ideal. That said, the dollar-value of the shares owned by insiders is still quite meaningful.

The relatively rare and always welcomed CFO insider purchase took place in Feb-26, when CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy bought $1.6mm in stock on the open market. This is the only major insider purchase over the last 2 years from what I can tell.

Management Compensation

Management compensation is mostly a combination of (1) base salary, (2) annual cash bonus targeted at 100-200% of base salary (that is awarded based on a mix of company-specific and individual-specific annual goals), and (3) equity incentives consisting of a mix of performance-based RSUs (PRSUs), time-based RSUs, and stock options.

PRSUs and stock options account for ~3/4ths of targeted equity comp for Dara and Balaji. Less so for Andrew (~one-half), Jill (~1/3rd) and Tony (~1/3rd).

Annual cash bonus is derived from a mix of company goals (60% financial / 40% strategic & operational priorities) multiplied by an “individual modifier” (that is based on the achievement of individual/functional goals). Here is how the company goals were calculated for 2025:

PRSU “achievement” (or vesting) is determined at the end of 3 years. 80% of the award is based on the achievement of key financials goals/metrics, and 20% is based on the achievement of long-term strategic goals and metrics. The entire award is then subject to a TSR multiplier (ranging from 0.7x to 1.3x) based on Uber stock’s performance vs. the S&P500.

The company is moving from using an adjusted EBITDA figure to a Non-GAAP EBIT figure (including the cost of SBC) as one of its metrics for measuring financial performance, a positive development.

Thomas Reiner of Altimeter points out that the company has been setting performance targets ahead of street consensus in recent years — certainly a “green flag:”

Thomas Reiner@treiner5

Some credit due to the $UBER board the past couple years in terms of setting target compensation. In both 2023 and 2024 EBITDA targets were set above where street consensus was at the time AND the company delivered ahead of target. h/t @dkhos GBV targets weren't as

4:21 PM · Apr 11, 2025 · 6.24K Views

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2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 21 Likes

He also notes that dilution has been relatively tame for the company in recent years.

Thomas Reiner@treiner5

Kudos to @dkhos and the entire $UBER team on moving to guidance metrics that are inclusive of stock-based compensation and dilution: @Uber has done a great job of reducing dilution as they've scaled, but this next step of aligning reported metrics with the actual drivers of LT

Bg2 Pod @BG2Pod

BG2 Ep5. Pod drop. Deep Dive on Stock Comp, Google Gemini / Apple, TikTok US & the New AI Cold War, MSFT / Inflection & VC Valuations for LLMs 💥👊 @altcap @bgurley

4:49 PM · Nov 4, 2025 · 153K Views

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7 Replies · 23 Reposts · 225 Likes

Capital Allocation

Capital allocation at Uber today mixes a few different priorities: (1) investing in organic growth (less mature products & geos), (2) seeding the Uber platform with AVs and generally helping to advance the AV ecosystem, (3) acquisitions, and (4) returning capital to shareholders in the form of buybacks.

Here’s the company’s “official” capital allocation framework, laid out at its 2024 investor day:

Because of Uber’s recent inflection in profitability, the company can actually afford to do all of the above simultaneously, according to management.⁶⁷ Here is CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy from Q4’25 earnings:

BK: “Sure. So we did lay out our capital allocation priorities in quite a lot of detail. But just to quickly summarize how we think about this. Our first priority is to ensure that we are making appropriate reinvestments behind the opportunity we’re seeing in our core business. We are in a good position where even as we make those investments, we are throwing off a lot of cash.

As we said, we were already generating about $10 billion of free cash flows, growing 40% as of the last year. So that gives us a lot of room to make investments in ensuring that we are advancing our AV strategy and potentially evaluating any selective bolt-on M&A opportunities as they come along. And then that still leaves us with a significant amount of cash that we can return to shareholders. So this is not a trade-off for us in the sense that we are choosing one or the other. We’re able to do all of these things in parallel.

As to your question on whether we would be returning 50% of free cash flows, based on our current visibility into what we’re seeing as well as the fact that our stock remains really cheap, we will continue to be aggressive buyers of our stock, and you should expect that it continues at a steady cadence, and we are on track to reducing our share count by a healthy amount as we go forward.”

DK: “And I think the good news here is with our free cash flow generation and our expectation of the free cash flow generation increasing going forward, we can do both. We can invest appropriately as it relates to growth. And then at the same time, we are going to continue reducing the share count because ultimately, all of us are shareholders, and we think right now the opportunity to buy back shares is pretty awesome.”

Below is a list of investments Uber has made in the AV ecosystem. This is on top of all of the partnerships that Uber has struck (e.g. WeRide in Dubai/Abu Dhabi, Pony in Zagreb, Apollo Go in London, Nuro in SF, etc.).

By my count, Uber has committed $1.6bn+ in the form of equity investments and another ~$3.5-4.6bn in the form of vehicle commitments (or $5-6bn+ in total). The vehicle commitments are over 5+ years, and are based on partners hitting certain self-driving milestones (so they may not all come to fruition). The FT recently published an article stating that Uber has committed more like ~$10bn (~$2.5bn in equity / ~$7.5bn in vehicle commitments), so I could be short. The FT article does not provide a breakdown by investment.

It should be noted that Uber’s largest investment cumulatively — $500mm and a 35k vehicle commitment to Lucid — has perhaps already gone sideways. It was reported in Jul-26, just two months after Uber’s second investment in the company, that Lucid had brought in turnaround advisors AlixPartners. This sent Lucid stock down by more than half on the day. Lucid denied it was filing for bankruptcy, saying “the rumors are completely false” and that “the company has sufficient liquidity to carry its operations well into next year.” Lucid laid off 18% of its workforce in Jun-26 which followed a 12% cut in Feb-26.

As discussed previously, while Uber is using its balance sheet and cash flow to seed its platform with AVs, the company is clear that the objective is to remain asset-light longer-term. Whether and how soon Uber can dial back the capex remains to be seen.

Buybacks

Uber’s buyback activity has coincided with a material ramp in its adj EBITDA generation, which has gone from ~breakeven in 2022 to almost $9bn in 2025. Uber authorized its first share repurchase program of $7bn in Feb-24 and then a second $20bn program in Aug-25.

The company first began buying back shares in Q2’24, and ramped buyback activity significantly in 2025. With Uber’s share price falling ~25% over the course of Q4’25/Q1’26, Uber ratcheted up repurchases further in Q1’26 (to the tune of $3.0bn in the quarter).

Management has laid out an expectation that Uber’s share count should fall for at least the next few years. Management has also stated that while they intend to buy back stock consistently every quarter, they will be opportunistic and ramp spend on buybacks when they see a “dislocation” in price. From Q2’25 earnings:

“Maybe a couple of points on the buyback to help folks understand how we think about it. As this business has inflected, and we have started to generate meaningful cash flow, returning that cash to our shareholders is a key priority for us. We’ve already executed over 60% of our authorization from last spring, when it was originally authorized.

So today’s $20 billion is in addition to the roughly $3 billion that is yet to be executed. So I know that sometimes folks get confused on that. So think of it as $23 billion to execute over the next couple of periods here. That represents about 12% of our market cap and really is a reflection of how great we feel about the cash flow generation that’s in front of us. So if you look at our history now, we’ve been allocating around 50% of our free cash flow to buybacks.

I think that’s a fair sort of way for you to think about how we will execute the capital return over the coming years. That gives us also a good sort of way to benchmark how we want to design our programs every quarter. So you should expect this to be sort of a multiyear plan. We will be active every quarter. But of course, we always reserve the opportunity that if there is a meaningful dislocation, we’re going to get very opportunistic in the market.

And just a reminder that we made a commitment last year in our Investor Day that we were going to turn the curve and start reducing our share count. And now in the second quarter, we’ve actually taken share count down 1%, and you’ll see that trend continue for the next couple of years.”

Q1’26, I think it’s fair to say, was one such “dislocated” period in management’s view.

Leverage

The company introduced a 2x EBITDA gross leverage target at its 2024 investor day and a strong desire to remain “investment grade” (i.e. rated BBB or higher; Uber debt is rated BBB currently).

Post Delivery Hero acquisition, Uber will have ~$26bn of debt ($10.5bn as of Mar-26 + $16bn new bridge facility) vs. an expected ‘27 EBITDA of ~$16bn. This equates to ~1.6x of gross leverage.

However, if we take into account Uber’s ~$4bn of cash (~$6bn as of Mar-26 less ~$2bn to help fund DH), and we take into account Uber’s ~$8bn of investments (of which $2.6bn, $2.5bn and $2.1bn are in Didi, Grab and Aurora, respectively), Uber’s net leverage will be ~0.9x. The investments, of course, aren’t as liquid as cash. But Didi, Grab and Aurora are all publicly listed.

In all, Uber is positioned conservatively in terms of financial leverage. However, any leverage at all for a company in a rapidly changing industry like Uber’s (and where competitors include the likes of Google, Amazon and Tesla) makes me a little nervous. My hope would be that Uber prioritizes debt repayment over the next couple years.

M&A

Dara has expressed a strong preference for organic growth vs. inorganic growth.⁶⁸ I can appreciate the sentiment, especially coming from an ex-banker and “deal guy.” From a Mar-26 Semafor podcast:

“I think the best M&A strategy is not to have to buy anything. Deals are hard. The majority of deals fail. So my job, number one, is to build out a path for organic growth. And we’ve grown over 20% for I think four or five years now. That continues for the next 3 to 5 years where I can actively plan for…My job is to set that reality so that any M&A that we do is essentially optional. And on top of that we tend to look at M&A in areas that are adjacent to us. M&A doing the same thing that we do, expanding into different countries for example. We bought one of the leading food delivery players in Turkey, which has been an enormous success. So M&A will always be a complimentary strategy, but my main job is to make sure I never need to buy anything and the business keeps growing at very, very healthy rates.”

Below are Uber’s most notable acquisitions and divestitures.

Most of them seem defensible, though it’s hard to know for sure without seeing the underlying numbers.

As discussed previously, I like the Delivery Hero acquisition for Uber. The deal (1) adds significant scale to Uber (22% increase in bookings), (2) was done at a reasonable multiple (~8x ‘27 EBITDA), (3) adds leading markets (38 of the 50 markets added are in #1 market positions) including crown jewel assets Baemin, talabat and Hungerstation, (4) shifts more profits to delivery, (5) shifts more profits overseas and (6) almost doubles Uber’s number of multi-product markets.

The recent food delivery acquisitions in Turkey seem smart (Uber paid ~$1.2bn combined for Trendyol GO and Getir’s food delivery business). I believe this gives Uber the leading delivery position in the market, and allows Uber to pair its leading mobility business in the country with a leading delivery business (a very important structural advantage, as discussed). Turkey was Uber’s 3rd largest untapped delivery market (out of the countries in which it operates a mobility business), behind Brazil and India.⁶⁹ This seems like it will pretty clearly go well (so long as Turkey remains a hospitable country in which to do business). In fact, Dara commented at a Sep-25 Goldman conference that the Trendyol Go acquisition “so far has been an absolute terrific success.”

Acquiring the Foodpanda business in Taiwan would have given Uber effectively a monopoly position in food delivery in the country (the market was split ~50/50 between Uber and Foodpanda), so that logic is also easy to follow. Perhaps predictably it was blocked by regulators, however, and Uber had to pay out a $242m break up fee.

Uber spent over $7bn for an assortment of delivery businesses (Postmates, Cornershop, Drizly) in the 2019-2021 period that were likely overpays, but did help Uber jumpstart its delivery business (in the US, in grocery delivery, in alcohol delivery, and in Latam) at a critical juncture.

The $3.1bn Careem acquisition also may have been an overpay, but it cemented Uber as the clear leader in mobility in the Middle East. Uber, however, failed to translate this mobility dominance into delivery dominance. Delivery Hero’s talabat and HungerStation led in delivery in the Middle East by a significant margin prior to being acquired by Uber.

Uber’s most recent deals for Blacklane (a high-end chauffeur service) and Spot Hero (a parking app) seem like good strategic fits. Uber can likely leverage Spot Hero’s parking inventory as part of its self-driving offering (places to idle cars when not in use). Uber also plans to bundle discounts on Spot Hero inventory within the Uber One offering, providing an additional benefit to members.

The most questionable acquisition was likely Transplace. Uber spent $2.25bn for it on the hopes that, combined with its freight brokerage business, Transplace would position Uber to be a force in the freight space. This hasn’t come to pass, with Uber Freight’s growth stalling the last few years.

The divestitures mostly all seem defensible. This effort began before Dara arrived in Aug-17. Uber’s first divestment was its China business, which it sold to DiDi in Aug-16 in exchange for a ~18% stake in DiDi. It later sold its Russia business to Yandex in Jul-17 in exchange for a 37% stake in Yandex.Taxi, a JV (which was later bought out completely by Yandex). After Dara arrived, Uber divested its SE Asia business, Uber Eats India, Uber Elevate and ATG. These divestments led to stakes in Grab Holdings (28%), Zomato (10%; a food delivery operator in India), Joby Aviation and Aurora (26%; self-driving truck tech), respectively. I believe Uber’s stake in DiDi has lost ~67% of its value ($8bn implied value at the time of the divestment vs. a carrying value of $2.6bn today). Uber’s stakes in Aurora and Grab are valued around the same levels today that they were when they were acquired.

The most questionable of the divestments is likely that of Uber’s Indian food delivery business. Uber sold it for an implied value of just $200m, from what I can tell. Dara has subsequently expressed regret that Uber doesn’t have a delivery business in India to pair with its mobility business in the country. Uber does seem on the verge of announcing a closer partnership with one of the Indian delivery businesses (likely Zomato).

While many of Uber’s acquisitions have been tuck-ins and good strategic fits (where Uber is perhaps paying a market-ish multiple), Dara has also espoused the wisdom in the “overpay” for the truly great asset. Here is Dara from a Nov-25 HD in HD podcast, recounting how the best deals at IAC looked like “overpays” at the time, but made up for it (and then some) through many years of strong growth (e.g. Hotels.com, Match.com):

“I do think one lesson that I’ve learned is…the best deals that Barry and I embarked on were deals where we actually overpaid, but recognized that this was a great asset that would have compounding growth for years and years and years. So coming to growth assets with a strict valuation framework of like you know how much is this asset worth now, often misses the point which is it’s not about how much asset could be worth now or next year. How is it going to compound over the next 10 years?

You could argue we overpaid for Match.com…There was an auction for Hotels.com. We were the top bidder. We were convinced that the compounding of offline travel to online travel, it was just very, very early. We were convinced that it was going to continue for 20 years. And that allowed us to “overpay.”

So I think over a period of time as we move from traditional assets that have kind of more traditional metrics, growth metrics to internet assets that can compound for a really, really long time, we learned our lesson that it’s not about identifying what’s cheap. It’s about identifying growth opportunity and compounding on top of compounding. It’s magic when that happens.”

Overall, it seems likely that management will be at least reasonably intelligent when it comes to M&A.

High on Uber’s M&A wish list are likely:

• Instacart. As discussed above, the company is a nice strategic fit in US grocery delivery

• Zomato. Huge market opportunity in India delivery. Could pair with Uber’s mobility business, giving them a key strategic advantage in the country

• Rappi. To consolidate share in Mexico delivery

• Other rideshare — Bolt (Eastern/Central EU and Africa), Ola (India), Grab (SE Asia)

• Expedia. Has been rumored in the past. Dara was CEO at Expedia for over a decade and is still on the board. This would be monumental, and would cement Uber as the all-things travel app (would add hotels, vrbo’s and flights). Expedia currently has a market cap of ~$30bn vs. Uber at ~$150bn.

Management “nuggets”

• Level skipping⁷⁰

• Bet on people⁷¹

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Conclusion

It seems unlikely that, in the post AV world, these markets don’t converge back to 2-3 players.

The rideshare/delivery platforms will still benefit from virtuous cycles. The network with the most riders, in theory, will have the best utilization. If you have the best utilization, you can offer the cheapest fares, thereby generating even more riders. Additionally, the network with the most riders, in theory, will have the most vehicles. If you have the most vehicles, you can offer the best ETAs, thereby also generating even more riders.

These types of virtuous cycle industries tend to exhibit a winner-take-all dynamic. Thus, like in the pre AV world, I’d expect only ~2-3 “winners” per geo in the end.

It also seems unlikely that Uber isn’t one of these winners.

By the end of 2028, we could look up and Uber might have:

• ~$16bn of EBIT

• ~100mm Uber One members

• Line of sight to being the largest purveyor of autonomous rides in the world within the year, with a growing set of proprietary depots and charging infrastructure

• Sizable volumes of hotel bookings (maybe even a “flights” product), cementing Uber as the go-to, all-things travel app

Given all this, given Uber’s huge lead in rideshare/delivery, and given that most people won’t use more than 2 apps for either rideshare/delivery, are we really to believe that Uber is going to be somehow disrupted by “AV-natives?”

At this point, I don’t see it.

However, that’s not to say things couldn’t get choppy.

I think you have to believe Waymo is going to ramp the production of its vehicles by a lot. And you have to believe that Tesla will get to L4 (and subsequently also ramp production by a lot). Without even accounting for Zoox, this seems like a recipe for “price wars.” Waymo is backed by Google after all. And Tesla is foaming at the mouth to ramp Cybercab production and aggressively undercut Uber on pricing. Tesla has the manufacturing capacity to do so, and will likely be owned by SpaceX in the not-too-distant future.

While I think Uber has done a nice job playing its cards, AVs reopen the playing field. And unfortunately for Uber, some of the largest companies in the world are entering. Thus, even though I don’t believe Uber gets “disrupted,” I do think there’s a good chance Uber will need to defend market share through price concessions. Price concessions lead to margin pressure.

How bad of an impact this could have on Uber is still murky to me. I could see it perhaps being not so terrible because: (1) these AV natives still have a long way to go before actually impacting Uber’s financials, (2) a flooding of the market with AVs will actually lead to increased demand for rideshare (as is happening today in SF, etc.) which could offset pricing pressure, and (3) perhaps Uber’s not-so-demanding valuation today is doing the heavy lifting of pricing all of this in.

However, I could also easily envision pain as: (1) aggressive actors tend to ruin the party in these industries (commodity products; everyone knows the most market share wins and invests accordingly), (2) three of the largest, most aggressive companies in the world (Waymo, Tesla and Amazon) have entered the space (and aren’t exiting anytime soon), and (3) the number of AVs (and corresponding level of investment) needed to significantly impact the market is not outlandish.

In the end, though, if this all breaks right for Uber, we could be looking at the company as a dominant global transportation infrastructure business. It has the opportunity to be a “tollbooth” business, earning a cut of the transportation spend (mobility + delivery) of a large portion of the global population. If things break right, it will have huge scale, probably absurdly strong moats, likely attractive ROICs (even if it were forced to own many of its vehicles and infrastructure), and a very long runway for growth.

1. Interviewer: “Will you have safety drivers in the first year, or are you ready to go without a safety driver?”

Dave Ferguson (Nuro Co-Founder & CEO): “So over the next year, year and a half, as we’re doing all the testing and development and final validation, for sure we’ll have safety drivers. The intent is to launch a commercial service by the end of 2026 that does not have safety drivers inside.” — This Week in Startups (Sep-25)

2. “One of the things that gives us a lot of confidence in the timeline that we talked about publicly for the Uber launch is the fact that the driverless deployment that we did late last year from an operational design domain perspective is pretty similar to what the city scale ODD would be to launch a robotaxi service. It’s basically all surface streets within a given city. Not highways yet. But no restrictions on maneuvers in terms of unprotected turns or railroad crossings and so on. You have night time driving. You have light rain, and so on. So again, from an ODD perspective, you don’t have to progress that much in terms of where the Nuro driver was when we did that launch late last year to where it needs to be late next year.” — This Week in Startups (Sep-25)

3. Interviewer: “Are you expecting when you launch next year, is this something that people are only going to experience here in the city or are you looking at general Bay Area?”

Dave Ferguson: “It’s going to be general Bay Area.”

— TechCrunch Disrupt (Nov-25)

4. “I was in a car the other day…This guy drove for a car service company, but he also drove for Uber and for Lyft. And I was just asking him the differences, which one he thinks is best, which one he likes the best. He said Uber. And he said even though Lyft pays him more per ride, Uber is better. Not only because of the app, but more importantly, because when he gets somewhere and he needs to have a ride — he drops somebody off and he needs to have a return to take somebody back. There are always more people on the Uber app, and you can more quickly find and locate a [passenger]. And I just thought, okay, this is a company that’s going to pay you less — you still think they’re the best. It sounds like game over.” — Becky Quick, Interview with Dara Khosrowshahi, CNBC (Jul-26)

5. DoorDash does have a partnership with Lyft, where DashPass members can receive 5-10% off Lyft rides, but its only up to 4 rides per month.

6. “Now I would tell you that early on in the initial months when someone becomes a member, typically that is profit negative for us because the discounts that we offer the member exceed the increment in terms of how much they use the product and/or how well we retain them. Both of those go up. As the members mature, 6-plus months, then the members actually become profitable as well. So in the first 6 months, actually moving someone over to membership, especially moving someone who is already a high-frequency user is a net negative. We still make money on those members, but it’s a net negative in terms of margins and then it becomes a net positive as the power of the platform comes in, cross platform comes in and retention kicks in as well. So it’s just an example of kind of a near-term investments that we make to drive long-term engagement and long-term growth. And the math behind those investments in terms of the lifetime value versus the cost of a member acquisition continues to improve.” — Q3’25 earnings

7. A big driver of the falling prices has been the rapid decline in LiDAR costs. Around the time Waymo was conceived, the cost of a single LiDAR reportedly cost ~$75k. Today, you can pick one up for less than $200.

8. LB: “Everybody buys a car for their extreme uses, not for their typical uses. So the size of the car, the size of the battery, all of that mass is is being designed for the extreme or occasional trip, not the everyday trip. I think autonomous driving and AI and connected cars will take us to a world where the vehicles can be tailored to the trip.

So, if I’m going from my home to my country club on roads that don’t exceed 40 miles an hour and it’s a 15 minute trip, doesn’t that make sense for me maybe to be in something that weighs 1,500 or 2,000 lbs rather than 4 to 5,000 lbs? Maybe something that has two seats rather than six seats? Maybe something that has a top speed of 50 miles an hour rather than 110 miles an hour?

So, I think we’re just getting started. Once people realize autonomous truly is real, and it is, they’re going to start really, really getting creative on the design opportunities for the systems that define how we live. And I get very, very excited about that future. I think it’s it’s going to be great.”

Interviewer: “I like the idea of they’re all designed for that that upper limit of extreme use. And the first thing I think of is — yeah, not every 747 needs to be Air Force One. Not every 747 needs to be ENP resistant with IR flares and bulletproof windows…They don’t need terabit uploads to NSA satellites to launch nuclear weapons. It would be nice, but you can also just go on a 747.”

LB: “There’s a great writer, Clayton Christensen. He wrote the book Innovator’s Dilemma…But he always argued that mature products get way over specified. They do way more things than what really is required for the fundamental value. And what happens in innovation is someone comes along underneath that and creates a new specification that’s much simpler, much lower cost, but still creates value and it disrupts the mature industry. And so today when you look at your typical car, it really really is overdesigned in so many ways.” — Lawrence Burns (author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car), Tommy’s Podcast (Nov-25)

9. We will likely also see premium offerings — for working comfortably while commuting, or watching a show and relaxing on a longer ride, etc.

10. DK: “So one example and it’s a little involved but customer service is another area that we use AI for. We have hundreds of millions of customer service interactions whether if you get your delivery late, etc. And we’ve automated some of that stuff. But when it gets to an agent, you know, if you break down what an agent does. The agent first of all has to understand, you know, Kara called, is she a good customer or is she a fraudster? We have a lot of fraudsters. You’re a great customer. Terrific. She said that her delivery was 30 minutes late. That’s your claim. The agent then goes [and looks at] our own fact base and you know there was an order placed. There was a courier who delivered it. There was a restaurant who prepared it, said it’s ready. Was it really 30 minutes late or not? Okay, it was 30 minutes late. Kara’s a great customer. Based on that, what’s our policy? ‘Hey, you get your money back because you are one of our best customers.’ And then last is how do we communicate that to you?

Each of those elements, what kind of customer are you? What was the claim? Translate the claim into something that can be solved by logic. Compare that claim with a reality on the ground. Based on that reality on the ground and the claim, what is the policy that we have and then how do I communicate that to my customer? All of that can be powered by AI. And essentially we are — and we will take a foundation model or a cheap Chinese open source model — and we will use those models to build all these solutions.

And initially what we’re doing is for example using that to empower the agent. So the agent instead of doing all this work themselves, the AI agent goes and does all the work, right? And comes and says, ‘Kara’s a good customer. This is what she claims...’ Well, here’s the thing, and this is where it gets hard. We thought this was going to be great, right? 5% of the time, give or take, the AI makes a mistake because they do hallucinate sometimes. And if they can’t find the data they’ll make something up. So now what we have is the agents are reading the AI recommendation — they don’t trust the AI recommendation... So as opposed to saving time, the agents [are doing] double the work and it was not a net benefit.

So that’s an example of our trying it. It not working. Now we are now going to more of a pure AI solution which is actually having AI solve the problem.”

Interviewer: “So they made mistakes before. So you give them the whole thing?”

DK: “It’s actually interesting… So we are having them solve problems where the cost of a mistake isn’t very high. And then we will learn from that and then eventually it will get good….A pure tech company can do what we’re doing, which is like we’re putting in the work, figuring it out, iterate, iterate, iterate. A traditional company is not going to go through that because it is a journey. This has taken over a year and they don’t know what to do about it. It’s just very hard to actually translate this stuff into the real world.

And what’s funny is the latest [strategy] that we’ve had is if you ask the AI to follow rules, sometimes it makes mistakes. We’re now kind of freeing the AI. And we’re like treat your customers well, you know, go check what’s going on. We give them very general guidance and that is turning out to have the best results, early on. So we actually throw away the rules and — you’re a smart person, use your common sense, here are some guidelines, here’s what I’m trying to do.” — On with Kara Swisher (Dec-25)

11. DK: “The area where I would say it’s got the most impact is actually our developer productivity. So, 80, 90% of our developers — and you know they are by far the most expensive talent that we have in house — they are using AI developer tools like Cursor and many others. But it’s not just the developers coding. It’s checking the code, code documentation, ‘on call.’ We have hundreds of engineers that are ‘on call.’ And we operate in 70 countries, 15,000 cities. Something is going wrong somewhere all the time. So you need engineers to be on call all the time to fix the issues and essentially now we have AI agents that are on call. If there’s something wrong, previously the engineer had to spent hours and hours — you got these calls together, 20 engineers, ‘What’s going on?’ [Now] these AI agents are constantly, essentially looking at all of our systems and then they come to our engineers with a hypothesis — something went down here, pricing error, here’s a hypothesis. And then the human can look over the shoulder of the of the AI agent.”

Interviewer: “Does that mean fewer people?…”

DK: “The good news for us is we’re growing really fast and so we’re growing top line 20, 21%. My attitude is if an engineer can be 20, 30% more productive, you could take one view which is well then I need 20, 30% less engineers. I just think they become superhumans. So I want more engineers. So we are actually hiring more engineers because every engineer got more valuable to me. Other companies may make a different decision and, to your point, most tech companies that I talk to right now are using the opportunity to essentially keep headcount flat. I can grow the company, but I don’t really need to grow headcount. So basically margins increase. You see the technology margins are out of this world and it’s because people can do more with the same number of people.” — On with Kara Swisher (Dec-25)

12. Interviewer: There’s this recurring joke on Twitter — I don’t know if you’ve seen it — that over time, every tech company becomes an advertising company. Do you agree with that?

DK: “It certainly seems to be the way forward, and certainly [for] retailers, right? So I do think that if you look at overall trends, more and more of advertising money is going to that point of purchase. And the point of purchase at Uber and especially Uber Eats is very, very powerful. So, we had $1 billion goal. We’re going to beat it this year. Thanks to a really great job by the teams. And ads on the Uber app allows essentially restaurants to ‘meter’ audience based on their needs. If they want more audience during certain times, they can turn on ads. The return on their ad spend is 7 to 8 times. So it’s a great return. It is perfectly trackable. They can turn it on or turn it off. It’s a great product that’s growing very, very quickly and we’re quite optimistic about it.

Morning Brew Daily, May-24

13. “Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, you’re the most profitable food-delivery business in the world. Are you not worried that, you know, someone can come and disrupt those margins?’ But when you look at really how our margins are broken down, we have around 6.5% of GMV, which is our EBITDA margin, and we have almost, more than half of that actually is coming from advertising revenues, right? And that’s something that you can only have and build at scale.

So when you reach a certain scale, you know, the partners in Europe who want to start to advertise in this kind of... our restaurant partners, our grocery partners, but also CPG companies that advertise on our platform, right? And that’s...and if you take that out, our margins become much, much smaller, right?

Then we have a lot of investments that our partners do on our app in terms of marketing. So deals and discounts for the customers, right? And those deals and discounts are basically money that is not coming out from our marketing pocket. That’s coming from a restaurant pocket. As long as we provide them value, as long as for every dollar they put, they get more dollars back, that’s... that’s something they will want to do, to keep investing. And also that you get just with scale.

So if you take out these two components from our P&L, you see that we operate a marketplace at a very, very, very tight margin, if not breakeven, right? And that’s very hard to disrupt.” — Tomaso Rodriguez (talabat CEO) on MONEY MOVES by MONIIFY (Jul-25)

14. DK: “The Rides business has most of the audience and generally we move more people from Rides to Eats. So it’s an almost free customer acquisition tool for Eats.”

Interviewer: “It’s your largest customer acquisition channel for Eats, right?”

DK: “Yeah we get more new customers from Rides than we do from Google, Meta, Instagram, all of these other channels combined…All of it sounds great but the fact is that whatever pixel that you put on the Rides app to promote Eats is taking something away from the Rides app. So there’s a bunch of experimentation that had to be done which is what are the right surfaces, what are the right messages, how do you target it, how often do you target it, etc. So there’s a there’s a bunch of machinery that you have to build to do this stuff successfully…

So to the question of why is it happening now, is one, it looks great on paper but then to build the machinery, to actually do it effectively takes time. And then if Eats has this new customer acquisition source — every year new customers for Eats account for less than 10 percent of the overall business because it’s a big repeat business. So in year one, hey is it nice? Yeah, it’s nice, but it doesn’t really show up to external investors. But then once, you know — [what’s] the saying, compounding is the eighth wonder of the world — what’s happening now is the compounding is happening, right? So we’ve had like three years of the machinery working. So one year may not be noticeable, two years may not be noticeable, but three, four years. What we’re doing is essentially our margins are growing faster than our competition because we have a bunch of proprietary traffic that’s coming over and then on the Rides side, there’s proprietary supply coming over from Eats — again, compounding.” — Acquired podcast (Jun-23)

15. “We’re the only platform out there that has both rides and eats and it’s global as well. And that allows us to more deeply embed with our customers. About 30% of our Eats’ first trips come from riders, so to speak. We can cross promote from the Rides platform to the Eats platform. If you open up your Uber app now, you’ll see Eats being offered. You’ll see grocery being offered. If you’re looking to go to a restaurant for dinner, we’ll also offer that restaurant as delivery as a reminder that it’s available for delivery as well. So this cross platform promotion that we can do — no one else is doing it. It’s taken us years to perfect it.” — TBPN (Feb-26)

16. Interviewer: “I think you said one in five of your customers are using both mobility and delivery.”

DK: “It’s closer to a third now. So it’s increasing steadily.”

Interviewer: “It’s moving in the right direction. What do you do to get that number higher and where do you want it to be in, say, three years?”

DK: “Well, listen, we want we want to get to 50%. And once we get to 50%, I want to go higher than that. And it’s about the little interactions every day. For example, when I got a ride to the office the other day, along the way I was offered a coffee from Philz to be ready for me along the way to the office. And so it’s those little interactions that are a value add to the consumers. Like, great of course I want my morning coffee and if it can be ready for me right on the way to work that’s awesome.

That is also a way to kind of get me to use Uber Eats, for example. If I didn’t use it now, it’s all the time, but it’s these little interactions powered by personalization. Understand the context of where you’re going, and there’s a coffee shop close by to give you that opportunity. It’s those experiences that we have to build more and more, which is one of the reasons now I’m going to work more with the tech teams because, you know, they’re the ones building these experiences.” — Bloomberg Live (Jun-25)

17. “We believe that all of these synergies serve the customer experience, enabling us to attract new platform users and to deepen engagement with existing platform users. Both of these dynamics grow our network scale and liquidity, which further increases the value of our platform-to-platform users. For example, Delivery attracts new consumers to our network—for the three months ended December 31, 2025, approximately 58% of first-time Delivery consumers were new to our platform. Additionally, for the three months ended December 31, 2025, consumers who used both Mobility and Delivery generated over three times the Gross Bookings as compared to consumers who used a single offering in countries where both Mobility and Delivery were offered. We believe that these trends will improve as we further leverage the power of our platform, especially as only approximately one in five eligible consumers are currently active monthly across both of our businesses.” — 2025 10-K

18. “Especially in the US, there’s more crossover between couriers who deliver food and then drivers who drive people. There’s a much larger crossover and we can actually use Eats almost as a recruitment tool. In that moment when someone says I am interested in earning money, you know, gig money, on-demand, etc. with all the flexibility, freedom, etc. The faster you can get that person earning money, the higher the conversion rate. And because of Eats, you don’t need to get your car inspected, you know, there’s a lot of steps, additional steps —background check, etc. that’s required for driving — those steps don’t necessarily need to be completed to deliver food. You can get people into the food ecosystem, they can start earning on the Uber platform and then you can upsell them into additional opportunities — driving people, shopping, etc. It’s a structural recruitment advantage we have in terms of building up supply. And as you build up the supply, the liquidity in the marketplace gets better — surge comes down, pricing gets better, ETAs get better, your ability price gets better and the demand shows up to some extent.” — Acquired podcast (Jun-23)

19. “The point — I think it’s been well made now by us now — is that even within the US and even just within US mobility, you’re talking about 70% of our GBs and 70, 75% of our profits [come from] outside those top 20 [cities].

If I’m looking at Uber as a company, I would start by saying that’s true for US mobility, but then of course about half of the GBs of the company overall are delivery, which has sort of a different disruption risk profile from an autonomous perspective. I think it’s much more insulated from autonomous disruption. Autonomous drone delivery and autonomous bot delivery is a thing and will be a thing, but I don’t think it’s disruptive at its core…

And then if you take even just our mobility business and slice it into countries where average fares can support autonomy in the next 5 years versus not, there’s a big piece of that business [that will not be] relevant to autonomous cars as they’re currently designed today for years, right? How long until you have autonomous vehicles disrupting $3 average fares in Brazil or $2 average fares in India? So big pieces of our mobility business outside the US I think are just not going to be relevant for autonomous vehicles for some amount of time.

So then you get into the US story and I think we do a good job of saying, ‘This is not a top 20 story.’ This actually needs to be a nationwide story and it’s much harder for these deployments to get into those cities and then even once you’re in those cities or suburbs, how long until the economics actually work on a fixed fleet and the answer I think is going to be longer than people think.

So even though we’re very bullish on the technology, I think the specifics of how it gets deployed and how it rolls out are very different than how most people think about it in terms of software disruption. You can’t just push a button and have it. It’s not a social network that’s available to everyone as soon as you turn it on in a country. There are physical, real world challenges to deployment and it’ll take time.” — Andrew Macdonald (COO), The Compound podcast (Feb-26)

20.

MM: “Very few things in my life, other than family and friends, are set in stone. Grocery — being an e-commerce analyst and consumer Internet analyst in general is fun, because you get to learn about new things. If you look back a couple of years ago, it was the retail categories, furniture and things we all knew about, and I’ve been pulled into becoming a grocery analyst over the last four years.

The space has changed dramatically. We started, I believe at the end of 2022, putting a grocery basket together of what I’d call the consumables — the things you eat, shampoo, stuff you put on your body — and then light bulbs and things like that, in two separate buckets. We’ll call one just grocery. In grocery, for several years, Walmart was the runaway favorite, no one even close on pricing, Amazon was middle of the pack, decidedly average, right in the middle. And then when it came to the stuff like stocks and light bulbs, Walmart and Amazon were at price parity with one another, I think for obvious reasons.

What we saw since we came on in November is Amazon has really rolled out their same-day grocery offering to over 2,000 cities in the US. The first thing we did — we’d done this basket pricing in six large suburban markets in the US for several years — was spin it up and see how Amazon compares now. And it went from middle of the pack to price parity with Walmart overnight, it was jaw-dropping.”

BT: “And this was even as their delivery speed increased, right?”

MM: “Yes. So we titled the note, ‘The Birth of a Grocery Business.’ I had been skeptical and knocked down Amazon’s grocery business for a while, because it didn’t have a big enough SKU offering and the delivery time took long. So while we were all not paying attention — it’s not a secret anymore — Amazon put refrigerators in their whole fulfillment network, and they have a killer grocery product today. They’ve given some stats, something like, year-to-date last year, it grew 40x, it’s blowing the doors off. Now you have this world changing where it’s Walmart and Amazon competing for the core American grocery basket — ground beef, chicken, bell peppers, yogurt, milk — and that’s the real cost-sensitive area for the average American, and they’re both going right for the price point.” — Michael Morton (Analysis at MoffettNathanson), Stratechery (Jun-26)

21. Balaji Krishnamurthy (CFO): “One additional thing I’d add there is, while you asked about the top market, it’s important to remember that 70% of the U.S. is outside of the top markets and nearly 75% of our U.S. profits come from those markets. And that -- those numbers have been growing because those markets are growing faster than the top 20 cities. I think this is a very, very common misconception. We’ve heard many times that Uber’s profit pools are concentrated in the top cities, and it could not be further from the truth. And as you think about where AVs go in the near term, those non-top 20 markets are going to be unlikely to be addressed by AVs for a long time to come as well. So from our perspective, not only are we going to be well positioned in those markets to be the platform of choice for our AV partners. But for the remainder of the U.S., it is going to be played by traditional ridesharing operators such as Uber.”

Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO): “And also, just remind investors that 60% of our mobility gross bookings are international outside of the U.S. as well. So we have a big business in the U.S. outside of the big cities, and we have an even bigger business outside of the U.S. as it relates to mobility.” — Q4’25 earnings

22. “An often-repeated myth is that the vast majority of U.S. trips and profits are concentrated in the top cities. In reality, the U.S. is a very large and diverse market. Trips happening within our top 20 cities represent only 30% of our U.S. Gross Bookings and just 25% of our profits. The truth is that the U.S. market comprises a long tail of thousands of cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas with significant diversity in market characteristics and regulatory requirements. Over the last 15 years, we have sharpened and enhanced our ability to service these areas outside of our top 20 cities. The results speak for themselves: these areas are now growing faster and profit margins are already higher today. Said differently, even as AVs proliferate in dense urban areas over the next 5-10 years, we expect to serve a much wider and ever-expanding set of towns and suburbs, primarily with human drivers. Around 40% of our U.S. riders take trips outside of their home city, which means they expect us to be ever-present and able to get them on their way. Importantly, even within our top 20 cities, many—including New York City, Boston, and Chicago—do not have permissive regulatory frameworks, and policy reform is likely to take several more years, at minimum. New York City, the largest ridesharing market in the world, accounts for over 10% of our U.S. trips, and is also one of the most tightly regulated, with multiple key regulatory and licensing steps standing between testing today and full commercial service in the future.” — Q4’25 prepared remarks

23. Interviewer: “That implies a rosy picture for drivers, right? They are only called upon when they can maybe maximize their earnings because there’s peak demand. But there’s got to be some misgivings. What are your drivers, what have you heard? Are they afraid of being replaced by these robot drivers?”

Sachin Kansal (CPO): “We definitely get a lot of questions as you may expect. The good news is that what we are seeing in Austin so far, in the last six to nine months of our deployment, drivers have actually made more money because the overall number trips in Austin has been twice — if you look at our year on year growth in a city like Austin — it’s almost twice our national average. So the overall demand level in Austin has gone up. The number of trips that drivers are getting have gone up and the earnings that the drivers are getting has gone up as well.” — WSJ podcast (Nov-25)

24. “In terms of how AVs are affecting the overall business, listen, it’s very, very early. The biggest scale operations that we’ve got are with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta. And what we are seeing is that those markets are growing faster than other U.S. markets. And this is in a Q3 where the U.S. actually accelerated nicely Q3 over Q2.

So the overall U.S. market is strong, but we’re finding that, for example, growth in Phoenix, Austin, Atlanta was more than twice the rest of the U.S. So that’s certainly good signal. What that has also led to is that driver earnings in those markets are super, super healthy as well.

So in Austin, for example, where we have the most AVs on the ground, driver earnings per hour actually outpace the rest of the U.S. So whether or not the growth in those markets is correlation or causal, it’s too soon to tell. But the markets certainly look healthy. Our partnership with Waymo continues to be excellent from an operational standpoint. Waymo utilization is still very, very high.

And what we’re seeing is an overall market that’s healthy as well, which is really good signal as we transition to this hybrid network of AVs and human drivers.” — Q3’25 earnings

25. Alex Kendall (Co-Founder & CEO, Wayve): “So for the last 10 years we’ve been promoting an approach, a ‘next generation’ approach AV 2.0 that replaces that stack with one end-to-end neural network. Now, of course, that may seem more obvious today, but it has been contrarian for many, many years…Of course, anyone who’s worth a grain of salt [today] will use deep learning in various parts of the stack. But what you see in more incumbent solutions to autonomous driving is of course deep learning for perception and maybe for each different component but still a lot of hand interfaces, still a lot of infrastructure on high definition maps and perhaps reliance on a lot of hardware…”

Interviewer: “So Wayve is sensor inputs, motion output, gigantic neural net in the middle?”

AK: “That’s right. At a very simple level…A year ago we were just driving in central London. Central London, I think, is a great proving ground because it’s this unstructured, incredibly complex and dynamic city that our AIs learned to navigate around very smoothly, safely, and reliably. But in the last year, we’ve taken it to highways, to Europe, Japan, North America. Our cars were in New York City last week... And so bringing it global, being able to take it to different manufacturers vehicles and show a product-like experience — this growth I think really opened up a lot of inspiration around the world.”

Interviewer: “Why is it that you’re able to launch in hundreds of cities worldwide and, you know, some of the AV1.0 companies need to actually go out and build an HD map? Just say a word on how the technical differences are actually leading to differences in how the machine’s able to learn and how you’re able to roll out.”

AK: “Autonomous driving is is all about generalization. Generalization means being able to reason about or understand something you’ve never seen before. Every time you go for a drive, you’re going to see something new for the first time. What did we see today? We saw a road worker rolling out some carpet thing in front of the road, but on a pedestrian crossing, but not wanting to step out. And we had to reason about could we pass them without without yielding, for example. There’s just a example from earlier today, but you could think about all the new things you see on the roads every time you drive. You’re never going to see every experience in your training data. So that means that you have to be able to reason and generalize to things you haven’t seen before to be safe, to be useful around the world. And that’s what has motivated our our entire approach. So whether it’s a manufacturer giving us one of their vehicles and within a couple of months us being able to to drive it on the road. A couple of weeks ago in September this year, we unveiled a vehicle to media with Nissan in Tokyo. Just four months earlier was the first time we’d even driven in Tokyo and got hands on this vehicle. 4 months later, we were having media drive in the car, experience it, and that was a new country and a new vehicle for us.” — Training Data (Nov-25)

26. Interviewer: “It is. I mean -- so let’s -- some investors who may be a little more skeptical of Uber’s competitive positioning within AV and autonomous will say we’re going from a world where we have a marketplace of millions of drivers to a future world where you may have 2 or 3 main players that sort of either operate the software or sort of are the main network running AVs in the United States. Therefore, there’s a risk that either, a, Uber could be disrupted or, b, the unit economics, 2 or 3 partners as opposed to millions, are going to be inferior. What is sort of your counterargument to that? And how do you think about the key execution points to ensure that, that doesn’t happen?”

DK: “Yes. So I think that, first of all, like many of these technologies, and you look, for example, at GenAI and large language models, et cetera, you are seeing a real fragmentation of those markets, right? There are bigger players, but there are lots of smaller players coming in. And one of the factors that we’re seeing as it relates to AV is there’s a second generation of companies coming in. First of all, there are some first-generation companies that are augmenting how they have built AV technology.

The heuristic technology, they’re augmenting it with AV and getting terrific results there. But there’s also a generation of companies that are starting kind of from scratch single end-to-end models, larger models that are showing incredible promise in terms of time to market, fraction of time to market that some of the -- that frankly, I expected 5 years ago at a fraction of capital cost as well. So every piece of evidence that we see is that, whereas 5 years ago, I might have said probably 2 or 3 players, maybe 2, 3, 4 players, the cost is getting cheaper as this business scales. And so I think that the trend is one where you’re going to have many smaller players out there. You’re going to have big players, medium players, smaller players.

You’re seeing the same thing happen in the GenAI environment as well. There are the DeepSeeks of the world as well. And whereas 5 years ago, if you gather data in the real world while you feed it to train the models, now you’re gathering data. You’re using that data to feed the sims, and those sims are actually creating thousands of scenarios based on that single piece of data and then training the models as well. So every piece of evidence that we see is that there are going to be multiple players, and if I look purely kind of those 5 elements of commercialization, we have a huge part to play in all 5.” — Morgan Stanley conference (Mar-25)

27. “I mentioned my daughters are in a food influencer business that they created and each week they send out recipes. And they sent out a recipe one week calling for tandoori seasoning and my wife and I didn’t have it. We wanted to make it the next day. So, there’s a market about three miles from my house where ordinarily I would have jumped in the car, driven to the market, looked for the seasoning, bought it, and came home. That probably would have been a 30 minute experience. Parking the car, walking in, finding it, buying it, coming home. And it would have cost me six miles out of pocket cost. That’s about five bucks. And my time.

I go to Amazon and I find the Tandoori seasoning for $4.80 and it’s on my porch in 16 hours. There’s no amount of speed increase between my home and that market that could save me as much time as I saved by spending five minutes on the internet to find the tandoori seasoning. Now, someone might say, ‘How can you justify a 3 ounce bottle of spice delivered on your porch by a 200lb driver in a 7,000lb vehicle?’ Well, he’s also dropping off [something for my] neighbor and that neighbor and that neighbor. That’s economies of scale. It’s almost like that’s the new form of public transit — the Amazon delivery person — because all those trips were eliminated. All the trips that people would have made that the e-commerce people are making for us have been eliminated.” — Lawrence Burns (author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car), Tommy’s Podcast (Nov-25)

28. “Yes, Justin, in terms of the consumer downturn scenario on mobility, we see these circumstances in a number of markets. LatAm has been through a bunch of cyclical trends, et cetera. And usually, a downturn -- kind of the leading indicator of a downturn is a weak job market.

We might be seeing it. In some of the Western markets, we might not, it’s very difficult to tell. But when there’s a weaker job market, typically, our driver supply on the mobility side significantly improves. We’re a very, very flexible work platform, average earnings per utilized hour for drivers in the U.S., for example, is $33 per utilized hour. So it’s highly flexible, and the earnings per utilized hour are strong.

So typically, what we see is improvement in driver supply. As driver supply improves, surge comes down, ETAs improve, the service itself becomes more compelling. And as a result, volumes typically turn out to be quite sticky. In addition to those trends, we are actively investing in affordability, right? The membership program essentially brings prices down for both mobility and delivery.

And we’re investing in products such as 2-wheelers and 3-wheelers and UberX Share, all of whom provide discounts of, let’s say, 25% to 50% of, let’s say, the price of an UberX as well.

So we think that we can thrive in upturns and downturns. And I think that the team has proven that they’ve kind of execution capability to be able to perform in any kind of a market. And listen, we’re watching trends very, very quickly, and I do believe we’ll be able to adjust as needed.” — Q2’24

29. “Yes. I mean you have to manage different in a potentially tougher environment. But I think there are multiple angles as it relates to the resiliency that you see in our business. First, I would say that the categories that we’re in, food, transportation, grocery, historically, if you look at historical cycles, the spend levels in those categories during down cycles tends to be much less variable than other categories.

So if you’re not doing well or you’re going through a recession, you may put off the European trip, you may put off the home improvement, but you’re still going to treat yourself to that nice Friday night, take the folks out for dinner or order a nice Uber Eats dinner. So one is like either we got lucky or good, you can debate, but we’re in a bunch of really good categories. Second for us as it relates to geographic is we have incredible geographic diversity. We operate in 70 countries. Over 50% of our bookings come outside of the U.S. We’re not really subject to tariffs because we’re the ultimate local business. The money that comes from a Boston consumer goes to a Boston restaurant or the vast majority goes to a Boston driver. So we’re not really subject to all the tariff talk going on. Obviously, we hope for the best. So that’s kind of another differentiator for us.

Third for us is that our business model and our expenses are about 75% variable. [on a gross bookings basis, I assume] This is a very, very low fixed cost business. And I think coming out of COVID, for example, which was the biggest shock to the system, I think a quarter after the kind of peak of COVID, our Mobility business was profitable. I think that’s something that no one would have protected. And then last and certainly not least is that our revenue and our costs tend to be correlated in economic cycles.

So you can imagine in a weak economy, to the extent that consumer spend gets weaker, employment gets weaker as well, which would mean that the cost of our sourcing drivers, couriers would generally come down. So in stronger markets, both of them kind of shift up and down. In weaker markets, they also shift up and down.

So you look at the -- you look at these categories, the categories that we operate in, our geographic diversification not being subject to tariffs, our variable cost structure and the fact that our revenue and costs are correlated makes for a pretty good combination. And I think the team at Uber has gone through a lot. People said we could never be profitable. I think we’ve disproven that and then some. We’ve gone through COVID and navigated really, really well.

So I think when and if there is a significant economic cycle, I’m confident that the team can execute around that.” — JPMorgan conference (May-25)

30. Interviewer: “I was reading through the most recent earnings and you have a chart where, on average, over the last five years or so, drivers make more money per hour. If we entered some economic environment where a whole bunch of people were out of work and they wanted to become Uber drivers, but that would make it so that the average earnings across the whole platform would plunge because you have a ton of new drivers coming on, would you guys sort of gate it and be like, hey, we want to make sure that we don’t, sort of, flood the supply side of the marketplace?”

DK: “No, because one of our core philosophies is this is an open platform and if your background check comes in okay, etc., then you can have access to earnings opportunities. That’s a core belief for us. The economics take care of themselves. When you look at mid cycle, long cycle, if earnings come down on the platform then it becomes a less attractive platform to drivers and they will do something else. There is this counter cyclicality about our marketplace which is during really good times it becomes harder for us to recruit drivers. So the cost of supply goes up. So while revenue and gross bookings are growing and unit volumes are strong, our supply base becomes more expensive. During softer economic times, you get more drivers coming into the platform, ETAs comes down, prices come down, the price becomes cheaper, so actually our unit volumes accelerate. So if you look at our Q1 unit volumes, they grew 24% versus 19% in Q4. So we accelerated trip growth, which is not something that you see at our scale.”

Interviewer: “Right, so it’s sort of the ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market theory that sort of self-regulates this for you”

DK: “Yeah it’s not a theory, it happens.” — Acquired podcast (Jun-23)

31. “We define Gross Bookings as the total dollar value, including any applicable taxes, tolls, and fees, of: Mobility rides, Delivery orders (in each case without any adjustment for consumer discounts and refunds, Driver and Merchant earnings, and Driver incentives) and Freight revenue. Gross Bookings do not include tips earned by Drivers. Gross Bookings are an indication of the scale of our current platform, which ultimately impacts revenue.” — Uber 2025 10-K

32. “We define Marketplace GOV as the total dollar value of orders completed on our Marketplaces, including taxes, tips, and any applicable consumer fees, including membership fees related to DashPass, Wolt+, and Deliveroo Plus. Marketplace GOV does not include the dollar value of orders, taxes and tips, or fees charged to merchants for orders fulfilled through our Commerce Platform.” — DoorDash 2025 10-K

33. “One of the confusing circumstances as it relates to mobility when you look at the numbers, is that we are changing accounting methods in some countries where we essentially were the merchant of record. When we’re the merchant of record, essentially, we recognize bookings as revenue…It’s partially responsible for some of our revenue margin take rate increases on a year-on-year basis. And we recognize courier costs as operating costs. So the majority of the operating cost increase that you see is actually because of our recognition of courier costs as costs instead of contra revenue. If you normalize for all that on a year-on-year basis, with bookings up about 90%, operating costs are up about 65%, which is 200-plus basis points of margin improvement.” — UBS conference (Dec-21)

34. “UK business model change: Beginning in January 2026, following a UK tax law ruling, we transitioned from a merchant model to an agency model outside of London. As a result of this shift, driver payments will be reclassified from cost of revenue to contra-revenue, which will reduce reported revenue and revenue margin. There is no change to our merchant business model in London. We expect Q1 2026 and full-year 2026 Mobility revenue margin to be approximately 350 basis points lower, driven solely by this accounting reclassification. As a reminder, there is no impact on profitability from this change.” — Q4’25 prepared remarks

35. “So our user growth and frequency continue to grow at very healthy levels. We’ve got over 150 million users growing double digits, frequency growing 6% on a year-on-year basis. And we think that’s going to continue, from a couple of factors.

One is that generally our supply base is getting stronger. We’ve got 7.4 million now earners on the platform, growing 22% on a year-on-year basis. The quality of the service in terms of ETAs, in terms of delivery times and in terms of error rates, in terms of reliability, continue to improve. And as they continue to improve, the kind of underlying product gets better as the supply base improves, which is a tailwind as it relates to audience.

And then with audience, we’re expanding kind of the TAM, as I told you about, one, in terms of new product offerings, the 2-wheelers, 3-wheelers. Reserve, for example, is bringing many new customers, especially in the suburbs, who might not have used Uber, let’s say, for that ride to the airport. So that’s, for example, a new audience base.

And at the same time, we continue to expand our audience outside of the core markets in which we operate. There are a number of markets that we invested in, again, 4 to 5 years ago. Japan, South Korea, Germany, Turkey and Argentina. These are markets that we had not entered previously, because of regulatory issues. We adjusted our business so that we could enter those markets. And those markets tend to be at probably 20% to 25% of the penetration of our mature markets, and they are entirely new audiences that we go after. So audience for us is kind of -- naturally, the product has its own tailwinds as the product improves, a bunch of new products that we’re building and then a bunch of new geographies that we’re penetrating into. That’s really the audience equation for us.

Then it’s about frequency. Frequency is where we talked about service, but then membership is a very big frequency driver for us. About -- over 50% of our Delivery gross bookings come from members now. About 1/3 of our overall gross bookings come from members. Membership growth continues to grow at very, very high levels, and members spend 3.4x more than nonmembers. And then on top of that, we have multiproduct usage, and multiproduct usage continues to grow very quickly as well and multiproduct users spend over 3x more than single product users. So service level, membership, and multiproduct are the drivers for us of frequency. And again, we don’t see any reason why those aren’t going to continue.

Price, for us, we essentially want to keep price flat if we can. And price will be a mix of, typically, will grow faster outside of the U.S. than inside of the U.S. So kind of geographic mix will be holding price down for us, and we just -- we think that as a company, we should take price as sparingly as possible.

The other angle to all this is base business versus, let’s say, growth businesses. And our base businesses, if you look at our traditional mobility business, the UberX business or traditional online food delivery business in Uber Eats, those businesses are growing at, call it, low to mid-teens. And then on top of that, you layer the growth bets that we have is $20 billion of gross bookings that are growing at almost 70%. That part of the business is going to get bigger, and so you have kind of a higher growth part of the business becoming a higher penetration into the overall bookings mix, which again gives us relative comfort that the top line -- we’re going to be able to grow at very, very attractive top line percentages compared to other technology companies of similar size and scale.” — Goldman conference (Sep-24)

36. “So maybe start with a reminder that back in February, we set a 3-year CAGR framework where we said the -- our view was that the top line or gross bookings would grow in the mid- to high teens, and then we would drive leverage off of that for EBITDA to grow in the high 30s to 40%. So you look back at this last quarter, third quarter, we grew 21% at gross bookings level. We’re at a $50 billion run rate now. So the business really is humming along.

And when we look at sort of what’s behind that strong growth, it’s really the -- what’s sort of reassuring to me is that it is very broad-based. It is across multiple products, it’s across multiple geographies. Probably, the most challenging question I get from investors is what’s driving the growth. And it’s an unsatisfying answer when you say everything, but it really is a reflection of just how diversified and strong we are experiencing right now.

If we look at sort of particularly where have we been making some investments that are really helping to support that and why we feel good about sort of the position we’re in, I think we like the investments that we continue to make on quality. So the consumer experience is really driven by things like liquidity, selection, defect rates, et cetera. We’ve had I think growth in couriers and earners -- in general, couriers and drivers, 21% growth in the number that have come on the platform. Number of merchants that have come on the platform is up 12% year-over-year for Q3. So that continues to make the supply and choices available to consumers better, which improves sort of the quality of the experience they get.

Another area that has been very relevant for us in 2025 certainly has been focusing on use cases. So we’ve got some really good use cases such as the New York shuttle, the investments we’re making in grocery and delivery, and those are continuing to feed the growth. What else can I say? The focus on less dense markets, I think, has also been one that we’re very happy with. Instead of focusing purely on the metro cities, we’ve been expanding to look at suburbs and sparser markets. And those are growing 1.5 to 3x as fast as cities. So overall, I think we’re feeling this has just been a great -- it’s been a great year for us, and we feel the momentum is going to continue.” — UBS conference (Dec-25)

37. DK: “So we have been very, very happy in terms of our user growth. And in terms of the strategy behind the user growth, I’d laid out in terms of there’s products, there’s use cases, there’s demographics and then there’s geographies. And we are introducing products along each of those different segments.

If you look at the products, for example, our Moto product, it’s a 2-wheeler product. It is much more -- it’s a lot cheaper and more affordable, that is bringing on significant new segments to our audience. And then we’re seeing on occasions, those Moto users, if it’s raining, if they’re on a date at night, they will upgrade to an UberX or other use cases. So just introducing newer products is one area where we get new consumers. And then there’s new use cases. A new use case might be Reserve where we thought that Reserve was actually going to serve people who wanted higher reliability.

But it’s also -- there’s a whole customer base, much of them in the suburbs outside of the big cities that didn’t find previously Uber reliability high enough for an airport trip, for a time-sensitive trip. Now they do because we offer the Reserve product. And so that is a product that has higher margins, has higher earnings for our drivers as well. At the same time, is introducing new customers into the flow. Same thing for women preferred. Same thing for teens, same thing for older demographic, kind of the simpler product that we have. All of these are introducing our kind of newer use cases or different demographics that are coming to the platform.

And then last but not least, I’d say international and the growth that we see in the less dense markets that Balaji just referred to. This is growth outside of the mainline cities. Generally, growth in less dense markets is about 1.5 to 2x more than growth in the middle of the big cities. This is a result of, again, new supply coming on first and then new audience coming on after that supply as well.

So we’re very, very happy with the customer growth. And at this point, we don’t see any signal of it slowing down. And then, of course, what I started with, which is AVs are an entirely new use case. There are people who are curious about the product and then there are people who absolutely love the product, and we think AVs can be another opportunity for customer acquisition. Anything to add, Balaji, to that?”

Balaji Krishnamurthy (CFO): “I’d just say just adding some quantitative lens on everything Dara said. If you think about where the crux of our growth is coming from, it’s still audience growth, which is very encouraging for where this business will go over the next few years. And looking at 2025, we started the year with MAPC growth at about 14% year-on-year. We ended the year with MAPC growth at 18% year-on-year, which is a very, very strong step up. And there’s a lot of runway in front of us still as you look at that MAPC number at over 202 million monthly actives, our annual active base is over 450 million, and we are continuing to improve our penetration of that base.

As we’re doing that, frequency, while it is growing at a slower rate, that is more a function of our cohorts coming on and maturing from there. What we are seeing is our new rider cohorts, new eater cohorts are exhibiting much stronger retention than prior U.S. cohorts. And part of it is driven by our focus on early life cycle investments, we’re ensuring that consumers were acquiring, retain better through the early part of their engagement with Uber’s platform. Then as we introduce them to multiple products that we are serving our consumers with, which at this point, 40% of consumers in Q4 were using more than one Uber product.

And then finally, our membership program, which has been a key investment area and still is growing 55% year-on-year, that then supercharges that cohort that we are acquiring. So there’s a lot of runway here, and we feel pretty good about the investments we’re making, we are being quite deliberate in measuring the LTV to CAC ratios on that.” — Q4’25

38. “We remain very bullish about the opportunity ahead, as our current MAPCs represent only ~5% of the adult population in our operating footprint, and about half of our consumers use our apps just 1-2 times per month, versus a global average of 6.” — Q1’25 prepared remarks

39. “I think people — the average sort of consumer or investor — says well who doesn’t have Uber? Everyone I know has got Uber. So how much room is there left to run? But when you think about the sort of large tech companies in the world, they talk about billions of users every month. We’re still talking about 200 million users every month. There’s a lot of people that are still new to our platform. There are a lot of large markets where Uber is actually sort of a startup still. You think about the places like Germany and Spain and Japan on the mobility side, Argentina — these are huge economies where Uber is just getting going. So, we’re signing up a lot of new users. And then you’ll hear us talk a lot about engagement, too. People use Uber on average anywhere between 5.5 and 6 times a month. But in our best markets, that’s closer to nine, right? And then in the best decile of our best markets, that’s over 20.” — The Compound podcast (Feb-26)

40. Stephen Ju (Analyst): “So there’s a lot of underlying pieces here that’s driving the growth. But are any of these durable secular changes from your perception that should support higher growth for a longer period of time? So at least high teens in delivery and maybe high teens, hopefully low 20s in mobility over the next 3 years?”

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah (ex CFO): “Sure, sure. The -- I think maybe 2 -- I’ll tell you if I zoom back, how do I think about it? The first is what is the -- what’s sort of our view on penetration. And if we look at our top 10 countries in terms of gross booking size, the number of adults in those countries who use either Uber for rides or delivery is around 15%. So -- and then you have the other 60 countries where that penetration is even lower, right?

So on average, for the top 10, we’re at 15%. And then if you look within a given country, the number of folks who are using Uber and Uber Eats together is only at 20%, right? So when we think about over the next several years, why do we remain confident that there is years of growth in front of us? We know from looking at some of our stronger or more penetrated countries, there’s room to grow that 15%. So that’s going to continue to tick up and that we’ve seen that trend very steady across our largest markets.

You look at the long tail of countries that are not in the 10 largest markets, and those still have to get to the 15%. So still plenty of room to grow there. And then you look at the opportunity to get more folks using both products and grow that 20%. Again, plenty of opportunity there as well. So -- which is really why when we -- over this year, we’ve been talking more about investing some of our profit dollars for longer duration growth ideas because we have many ideas that we view as -- given the opportunity set in front of us that there’s a long runway for growth, and we didn’t want to just focus on -- we’re coming to the end of our -- of that 3-year framework and then what happens at the end of that. There’s plenty to go beyond.” — UBS conference (Dec-25)

41. “We have had supply shocks in the past. For example, during COVID, one of the great things about COVID as it related to Uber — terrible event obviously — was that we were able to move our drivers, who were driving for Uber, to make money on Uber Eats. But then after COVID we thought everyone would get back to driving…So we had to reinvest in supply, very aggressively post COVID. Faster than our competitors, which helped us. Now we have a pretty finely tuned machine. Our retention of drivers is pretty high. On average, drivers are driving more supply hours and spending more time on our platform because they can drive, they can deliver, they can shop.” — TBPN, Feb-26

42. “So, when you order an Uber ride, we essentially have to scan the market for all the cars out there and where they’re going, etc. Are they available? Not available? And we have to match you to a car and we’ve got to price that ride in less than 30 seconds, right?

We want the ETA to be four, five minutes, and so we have very, very little time to make that decision. So the algorithms that are running have to work very, very quickly. They’re making tens of millions of predictions per second…It takes a certain architecture, it takes a bunch of compute.

With Eats, the average time to make food is like 10, 12 minutes. So your ability to make that match — you have a lot more time...We essentially make a bid to a courier who can accept the delivery or not. So, let’s say for a delivery, I’ve got three bids that I can make for the delivery before the food gets cold. My first bid might be six bucks. My second bid, if [the first courier says] no, may be seven bucks. If they say no, I really have to get you the food. The third bid might be 10 bucks…

The Rides team is like, ‘Oh, no, no. We can make this recalc’ in 15 seconds.’ So now we’ve got the ability to make 10 bids. So instead of going from 6 to 7 to 10, you can go from 6, to 6.50, to 6.75, 7 bucks. And so the ultimate cost per transaction, so to speak, is lower just because of compute, speed of algorithms and and decision making.” — Decoder (Oct-25)

43. “Well, I guess, you could argue the whole thing has, right? So we were -- came in at 21%, gross bookings growth, 60% EBITDA growth. Free cash flow generation as a percentage of EBITDA was 106%. So I think the team has done a really great job of execution. And I would say, for us, as it relates to the business, they’re just less surprises.

Like I take that as a really good sign, which is we have a team that’s executing well on a quarter-by-quarter basis, on a year-on-year basis. It’s getting boring, but there are just much less surprises as it relates to the business. And I would say, as it relates to mobility, we continue to be, I guess, surprised, if you want to call it that, by the strength of the core business and then some of the growth that we’re making actually feeding the core. So I’ll give you an example in terms of Reserve, one example. We had originally -- when we thought about the Reserve and kind of built the PRD in terms of Reserve, we thought, hey, this is -- it allows riders to pay a higher price for higher reliability, and that’s a good trade.

And so we will be able to get a premium, higher reliability, and that was a formula. It turns out that there’s actually, especially in the suburbs outside in the less dense areas, there’s a whole new user segment coming because with a relatively low reliability in those markets, they just didn’t use the product, especially for use cases like airports. So the actual -- some of these newer products are completely new use cases. They are premium segments and our margins and reserves are significantly higher than the margins of the core business, but they’re actually adding new audience to the business. Same thing, for example, 2 wheelers in Latin America and India.

These are lower-cost products. They’ll cost 40% of an UberX, and there’s a whole new segment audience coming in using these lower-cost products at much higher frequency, average frequency levels. But 20% to 30% of the time when they are going out on a date, when it’s raining, et cetera, they will upgrade from a 2 wheeler to a 4 wheeler to the UberX product as well. So a bunch of these newer products are actually driving audience growth, and audience growth for us, over 170 million monthly actives growing 14% has been a really nice surprise for us. And generally, I would say that core business, the expansion into less dense marketplaces, it really started with Eats, and it really started with Eats in the U.S. going into the suburbs and really going up against DoorDash, kind of DoorDash’s core strength. We expanded the Eats expansion into noncore markets internationally. For example, in the U.K., we think we’re now category position 1 in the U.K. as it relates to Eats. One of the biggest success stories in the U.K. for us has been growth outside of London in the secondary markets, et cetera. We’ve now translated that program to our mobility products as well with the Reserve and other products, again, growth outside the mainline cities.

So we are pleasantly surprised by the continual growth of the core. Part of it is driven by the new investments that we’re making in some of these newer products. Part of it is pleasant surprises like, oh my god, there’s a huge business outside of the city cores as well. And then on top of that, you’ve got membership and multiproduct as well that continue to be engines of growth. So all of that for us is turning out to be -- make for a pretty good equation for us going forward.” — Morgan Stanley conference (Mar-25)

44. Uber actually sued a group of LA-based personal injury attorneys and medical groups in federal court, alleging fraudulent medical bills. According to the article: “In Los Angeles County, Uber says it’s 45% [government-mandated accident insurance] compared to just 5% in places like Massachusetts and Washington D.C. That cost is passed onto riders. A lawsuit filed by Uber in federal court on Monday aims to address the problem by targeting what they call ‘phantom damages.’” Uber has also sued an alleged fraud ring in NY that was staging crashes to collect injury damages.

45. “We see similar sort of themes in Europe and markets like Lat Am as well, where we are expanding with our Moto product, which is today 15% of first trips in Brazil and 90% of these Moto consumers migrate from Moto to UberX and other Uber products, which are quite profitable for us as well, so lots of runway with the product and geographical expansion we are driving here.” — Morgan Stanley conference (Mar-26)

46. “Third, while the AV software stack is advancing, progress from auto OEMs has been slower. Yet OEMs will be critical to delivering cost-effective vehicles at scale. So far, most AV players have retrofitted a small number of traditional vehicles with the sensor kit that is necessary for safety today. With costs of over $200K+ per vehicle, these cars are extremely expensive. But in order to drive incremental TAM penetration, costs will need to come down dramatically—without compromising on safety. Even though OEM capacity remains a bottleneck to commercialization today, we believe that in the long run, autonomy will be an enabling technology and all new vehicles will be sold with L4-capable software. In that world, vehicle supply will gravitate toward Uber’s high-utilization network, much like the nearly 17 million drivers and couriers who took a trip on our platform in 2024.” — Q4’24 Supplemental

47. “Our strategy is consistent in automotive as with other markets. We’re trying to build the reinforced data loop from car to cloud, and that spans three computers. The training computer, the simulation computer, and the in-car computer. We’re trying to build the most efficient loop across those three computers. And we’re helping our partners — we built this stack to be modular — so they can pick and choose what parts of that full stack they want our help to develop.

So what we’re driving in today [a Mercedes] is a reference of how NVIDIA has built the entire stack — the platform layer, the chip, the sensors, the operating system, the models that run on this car, the application of parking, active safety and driving — you’re experiencing it. This is really good for a passenger car, right? And we trained the models, and we simulated the models.

And now we go to a customer, and we say, ‘Do you need help building your version of this?’ And we’ll help them any way they want across that 3 computer challenge. And the point of this is building this needs those three computers. That’s what we do.

So we have customers like Tesla, who says to us, ‘We don’t need any of your help for the chip in the car, the operating system, or the models in the car. We’ve got that.’ And so Tesla is an example of we don’t need you in the car or to build the models. But I need your help for training. And it turns out that you can use us just there, and Tesla is still our biggest customer in automotive. Because the infrastructure computer is the biggest computer. It’s the most important part — it’s the biggest brain, it’s where we help the most.

And here’s a case [Mercedes], where a reference partner is asking us to do the full three computers and the full stack. And that’s okay. And then last week there was an announcement that Wayve is working with Nissan to do robotaxis in Japan. And they’re also doing it in London. Wayve is a customer that builds the AV software themselves, but they develop on our chip in the car. That car is a Hyperion 10 car. So they’re getting our chips in the car. They’re building their AV software. They’re training on our GPUs in the cloud. And they’re using parts of our Omniverse synthetic data generation platform to test their software. So it’s a three computer customer, but they didn’t take the full stack. They took the portions of the end-to-end system that made sense for them, and augmented. And that’s what’s unique — there’s no [other] company that does that. There was another announcement that Zoox is working with Uber on robotaxis. They’re using us in-car, and they’re training their models in the cloud with us. So they’re working with us on two of the computers…Waymo is another one — they use us in the car and they use [us] to train.” — Ali Kani (VP of Automotive at NVIDIA) on Automotive News’ Shift podcast (Mar-26)

48. “We open sourced this model. You will have to train it, post train it on your data. So you’re going to use NVIDIA GPUs to train, right? Then you need to test it, and you’re probably gonna be testing on NVIDIA GPUs and then also Omniverse and Cosmos software, which is also open sourced. So if you’re a customer that uses that, and then you choose to inference on let’s say your own SOC, like Tesla, or someone else’s SOC — it’s still great for NVIDIA. And so we’re happy to open source it because the biggest part of our business is in training and simulation. And I think it’s the right thing for the industry, because why do you have to go figure out how to build it and train this model? Why don’t we give you the tools, the software, the frameworks, the scripts and the core code? So that you can then take it and distill it down, apply it to your vehicle and then ship it? Our strategy is just help people have the best AV. It’s not for them to buy our chip in the car.” — Ali Kani (VP of Automotive at NVIDIA) on Automotive News’ Shift podcast (Mar-26)

49. Interviewer: “Another thing that Jensen mentioned was the open sourcing of the model itself, the simulation as well as the data set. What is the rationale for Nvidia to do that? Is that a way of trying to set some standard or benchmark for the industry?”

AK: “Yeah. I think here it’s just understanding, the way our strategy — like what does NVIDIA, what are we thinking in all of these decisions? So the first thing is we have three computers that we try to help customers with. There’s the training computer, there’s the simulation computer, and then there’s the in-car computer. So when we open source Alpamayo, we open source the model but you need to take that model and you need to train it on some hardware. And so we’re selling you that hardware. So we’re open sourcing software, but we’re still helping you and you still need some kind of a target platform to train on. And so we’re helping you on the training side. So you have to be a customer on the training side.

And then same thing we can open source Cosmos to you, but it needs to run on something. It runs on RTX. And so, you know, you buy that hardware. So our our go-to-market is we sell you hardware and give you software, but then you know you need to use our hardware to run the software.

So the only place that’s a little bit unique is in-car. The in-car computer is the smallest of all our opportunities. You don’t actually have to use our chip in the car to be an important customer of ours. Our biggest customer in automotive actually is Tesla. They don’t use our chips in the car. But they do a lot of training on our platform. And so we love that partner.

And so for many customers, we could say, ‘Look, here’s some software. You could take it to build your own product. And let’s just help you with training and let’s just help you with simulation and you don’t need to use this in the car.’ By open sourcing Alpamayo, we’re also giving customers that choice. They can actually take Alpamayo and they could distill it down and run it on someone else’s computer and that’s perfectly fine because they’re going to be really important training and simulation partners of ours.” — Ali Kani, VP of Automotive at NVIDIA, Counterpoint Research interview (Jan-26)

50. Interviewer: “I’m interested in the number of partners that were announced today in the keynote. How is it that you’ve managed to rapidly build this ecosystem? As you say, not all of your partners are necessarily using NVIDIA hardware, but they’re capable of building on top of these different software platforms and even from hardware through to services as well. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what NVIDIA is doing there.

AK: “Yeah, I mean I think the key here is that when you want to build a level four system, what’s most important is safety. And NVIDIA, we have this platform, we call it Halos. What we mean by Halos is it’s like all of the tools and methodology and architecture to build a safe autonomous driving solution. We’ve taken all of our knowhow and we’ve crystallized it across the stack from the chip in the car to the operating system to the architecture to the application software to how we train and how we simulate all of that. We’ve taken that safety sensibility too from cloud to car and when customers are building level four systems the architecture we’ve built for Hyperion, it leverages so much of our knowhow that it accelerates the work of our partners in a significant way.

So the reason why the adoption is so big is as customers are taking a look at that architecture. How you have two Thors, each of them are redundantly powered. How we’ve architected the sensors such that if the sensors on this ECU fail, the sensors connected to the other ECU — they could still pull over, take you to a safe space and stop. When customers see all that work and the platform software that stabilizes that platform for us it just makes sense for them to leverage that architecture.

And we’ve now built a huge ecosystem of AV software companies that are also building software on that architecture, right? For an OEM, it makes sense — let me save my time, let me align to this architecture and now also I can call 10 AV companies who can be my partners because they’ve all invested in this one platform. It’s such a win-win for the ecosystem and it also brings the world to level four faster and it’s also a safer product because any learning we get from the ecosystem we put it into the platform and the base software. And so any bugs or anything that we learn from from all these ecosystem partners, we just roll it back in and everyone gets the benefit of it.” — Ali Kani (VP of Automotive at NVIDIA), Counterpoint Research interview (Jan-26)

51. Interviewer: “Are you able to say who is manufacturing the Uber partnership vehicles?”

AK: “We’re going to take time to pick. And it could be different ones in different cities. But you can see is we’re announcing Hyperion OEMs, right? So those are the choices that we have so far. We’ve announced Mercedes. We’ve announced Lucid. We’ve announced Stellantis. We’ve announced Nissan. We’ve announced Hynudai, BYD and Geely. So all of those are available. They’re exactly the car that we’re gonna be building to Thor with the sensors. And so then, it’ll just be a, ‘Where are you?’ What region are you in? And what’s the best OEM car for that region. And you know, they can buy whatever is the best option.” — Ali Kani (VP of Automotive at NVIDIA) on Automotive News’ Shift podcast (Mar-26)

52. “We are working with almost all [of the] OEMs right now. I would say 80% of the mass production OEMs are [working] in NVIDIA’s Hyperion ecosystem for L4. So we are really building this future with everybody.” — Xinzhou Wu (Head of Automotive at NVIDIA), Decoder (Jul-26)

53. Eric Sheridan (Analyst): “I want to come back to the concept you introduced in the letter around less dense markets. Could you go a little bit deeper in both the opportunity set but also some of the operational dynamics of building supply as well as stimulating demand in less dense markets and how we should be thinking about that scaling in the years ahead?”

DK: “Yes, Eric. We think it’s a terrific opportunity. And frankly, sometimes we kick ourselves for not recognizing it properly earlier. Uber started as a company in the middle of big cities and our biggest cities, Sao Paulo, New York, et cetera are -- continue to be the largest source of demand. But continuously, we’ve seen that our growth outside of the core in the boroughs of New York, now extending into the suburbs or in secondary and tertiary cities has been higher than the core itself, almost accidentally, and this is true for Mobility and Delivery as well.

And really for us, the start of our focus on less dense areas started with Delivery. In the U.S., especially if you look at noncore cities, et cetera, it’s 60%, 70% of the market, so the majority of the market there. Generally, it’s growing faster than city centers as well. So we’ve really started focusing on improving selection in those areas. And then like you said, then building out the liquidity that’s necessary in terms of both demand and supply, couriers and making sure that those couriers are busy.

And that kind of cycle, that positive cycle of investing in supply and demand together, increasing liquidity, getting better ETAs, getting better service levels starts to accelerate and add to itself.

And we’re starting to see that now in Delivery but not just in the U.S., we’ve extended this focus in the U.K., Australia, really all over the world. We’re looking at the density by quartile of all of the areas that we deliver to or all the areas that we are giving mobility services to people to and we are actively investing in those less dense areas. And we think the opportunity set there is very, very significant, both in Mobility and Delivery. So we think it’s early days and -- but it is a focus of both Mobility and Delivery. And I think it will be a tailwind to our core business in terms of growth over the next 2 to 3 years and hopefully even more than that.” — Q3’24

54. “I’d say generally in the US, suburbs are growing faster than cities. So this is a trend that started with COVID, and continues. And our growth in the suburbs and less dense areas is about twice our growth rate in the cities.” — TBPN (Feb-26)

55. “The way I think about where grocery and retail as a category is, I like to think about this as a journey where food delivery was in 2019 or 2020, right? So it’s quite early. And at that point of time, just for context, our food delivery business was doing about $14 billion of gross bookings. Our grocery and retail business right now is $12 billion, $13 billion. And now of course, our overall business is near $100 billion, so clearly, the expansion that came after that.” — Morgan Stanley conference (Mar-26)

56. “On top of that, obviously, we see our grocery business as well. Outside of the U.S., we are in a position — we’re absolutely in a pole position to be the leader in terms of grocery delivery.” — Goldman conference (Sep-25)

57. “And then the third big push for us is grocery and retail. The grocery and retail category is larger than the online food delivery category. This is about we are increasing selection there as far as the number of merchants that we have. We introduced Dollar General, Home Depot. There are some really exciting announcements coming up.

As we improve the selection for grocery and retail, we’re seeing a higher, higher percentage of online food delivery consumers trying out grocery and retail. It was about 18% of our audience on Eats tried out grocery and retail. It’s up to 30% in certain markets. So we think we have a good kind of running room there.

And one interesting factor that we’re seeing with grocery and retail is it’s actually -- when we first got into grocery and retail, I kind of thought about it as an upsell channel. Let’s take people who are buying food. Let’s get them shopping convenience and then we’ll get them kind of getting -- doing their weekly shop and driving basket sizes higher.

In the retail category, actually now there are retail occasions that we can really merchandise around that are attracting either big-time audience of our established audience to the site or attracting new audience. And for example, Valentine’s Day is an example, Mother’s Day was our best week ever as it related to grocery and retail. So that business is getting to be a higher percentage of our overall. It’s accelerated for 2 quarters running. It is variable contribution, profitable, not EBITDA profitable yet, and it will be too soon to drive EBITDA profitability.” — JPMorgan conference (May-25)

58. “Now I would tell you that the most important KPIs for us on Grocery right now are still customer-led KPIs. What’s the -- what percentage of our audience are we upselling into Grocery? What’s the repeat rate of that customer? What’s the average fill rate of a particular order? So in terms of importance, customer-facing KPIs are more important than P&L KPIs. Now all of it is important.

In terms of P&L, it’s really the biggest 2 items that we look at are basket size and then cost per order, right? And obviously, delivery costs a certain amount. So the larger your basket size, the greater opportunity you have for profits. And then the cost per transaction, the more to the extent you can batch, double batch, triple batch, quadruple batch, et cetera, that helps the CPT as well.

On top of that, we have the advertising revenue. Advertising and -- the advertising revenue for us in Grocery is relatively nascent, which is we have just built a sponsored items product very much along the same product that Instacart has built. Instacart has built a very strong advertising product, and we’re building something quite similar. And we’re quite confident that advertising in Grocery is going to be actually significantly higher as a percentage of GBs than our Food business.

When we put it all together, one big advantage we have on Grocery is our cost of customer acquisition is next to nothing. And we can upsell this audience. So that puts us in a position where we’re quite confident that over the next 2 to 5 years, we can grow Grocery top line. But every year, we can improve on Grocery margins at the same time and get to a profitable business. Most of the profits are going to come from advertising.

But the platform advantages that we have and the technical advantages that we have in terms of payment and fraud and CPT put us in a very strong position.” — Morgan Stanley (Mar-24)

59. “Number two is affordability in price. And the big levers there are our membership program, 60% of gross bookings coming from members that get locked into our ecosystem, so to speak. Obviously, they want to be locked into the ecosystem because they’re getting a great deal. And then merchant-funded offers. These are the offers that I talked about, and a higher and higher percentage of our gross bookings is coming from merchant-funded offers.” — JPMorgan conference (May-25)

60. “Based on third party data, we estimate our business currently addresses global markets with more than 300 million households and 750 million people, total restaurant spend of over $1.0 trillion, and total grocery and convenience spend of over $2.5 trillion. Based on those estimates, we believe the Wolt and DoorDash Marketplaces currently represent just 5% of restaurant spend in these markets and well under 1% of convenience, grocery, and non-food spend.” — DoorDash Q2’22 earnings

61. “So I’d say the first thing, again, if you start with the core, the food delivery business, if you look at the penetration of, for example, the broad retail commerce category, broad retail commerce is in the mid-20s in terms of penetration of overall e-commerce. Delivery is still substantially more immature than that. It’s probably in the mid-teens. So I do think that the online food, the core food delivery business still has significant runway ahead of it. And there’s no reason why it can’t penetrate just like overall commerce, if not more, because we certainly think the benefits could be higher.” — Goldman conference (Sep-25)

62. Michael Morton (Analyst): “Sorry to beat this synergy question to death, but are you able to bucket the synergies in size that are operational versus what your expectations are for revenue synergies?”

Balaji Krishnamurthy (CFO): “I’m not going to get into that level of granularity. But I will say that the revenue synergy piece embedded in here is quite small relative to the $1.2 billion. And I think as we look at the overall final delivery, my instinct which Dara shares is that likely that number will be larger.”

Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO): “Yes, I think, just to make sure we underline that. We’ve been very consistent with you, with the Street, with our investors as to what expectations are in terms of our performance. Whether it was a long-term plan that we put into place or it’s a quarterly guidance that we give you. And this is a team that delivers. And I think the Delivery Hero team has built an incredible standalone asset, so to speak, but we think that the synergy value here is compelling, and we wouldn’t be putting up a number like that unless we were highly confident to be able to deliver that number and hopefully more.” — Uber’s Delivery Hero M&A Call (Jul-26)

63. “Price, for us, we essentially want to keep price flat if we can. And price will be a mix of, typically, will grow faster outside of the U.S. than inside of the U.S. So kind of geographic mix will be holding price down for us, and we just -- we think that as a company, we should take price as sparingly as possible.” — Goldman conference (Sep-24)

64. “So the -- I’m going to -- let’s take that from the angle of a few things to remember in how we run the network. One, the goal for us is to drive our take rate as low as possible. There’s a few reasons for that. One, a low take rate creates a meaningful barrier to entry. Second, a low take rate helps create internal pressure on the organization to constantly be driving out costs and ensuring that we are running the network as efficiently as possible. You see that in every quarter, we report sort of a few basis points of incremental margin that we are able to extract from our cost structure by continuing to grind down those costs.” — Barclays conference (Dec-24)

65. “And at the high end, we’re building premium experiences that expand margins and support reinvestment. We’re already seeing strong momentum in premium, with Uber for Business (U4B) growing more than twice as fast as Mobility overall, as we continue to lead in corporate travel globally. Building on this, we introduced Uber Elite, our most elevated ride experience to date, designed for executives and frequent travelers, with professional chauffeurs and luxury vehicles and a high-touch, reservation-based experience. To further accelerate our plans, we announced an agreement to acquire Blacklane, a leading global chauffeur platform operating in 500+ cities.” — Q1’26 prepared remarks

66. Interviewer: “And did you learn what kind of people to bet on?…”

DK: “I think for me the most important was people who were loyal and people who told the truth. There were certain clients who you saw who, they would sell you in terms of expectations. They would sell you in terms of what they were going to do. And then there were some executives who I saw, who yeah I mean there’s some selling going on for any executive, but they would tell you both the good and the bad of their company and they came from kind of this “truth telling” place. And those were the people who I was always attracted to.” — HD in HD podcast (Nov-25)

67. “So when I think about the capital allocation priorities, for us, they fall into 5 separate pillars, and I’ll just go through them quickly.

The first one is that we will continue to make disciplined reinvestments into our core business. And effectively, what we’re trying to do there is to ensure that we are investing to maximize the lifetime value of our cohorts, ensure that the profit dollars that are flowing through to the business over time are maximized and really driving operating leverage as we are making these investments. So that’s the first pillar, and we’ll continue to do that. There’s lots of areas we can talk about in terms of the investments we are making.

Even as we do that, we are in this fortunate position where we just generated $10 billion of free cash flow, so it gives us lots of room to do other things on our capital allocation priority stack. And the #1 item that I think about there is to ensure that we are making the right-sized investments behind AVs. And for Uber, AVs are going to be a massive opportunity over the coming years, and we have this strategy here, which is designed to ensure that we are staying nimble. We’re making the right investments across the ecosystem, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that.

Then the third thing that we are doing is ensuring that for M&A, we are holding a very high bar. We don’t want to get distracted when we have the sort of opportunities we have in our core, and we are making these investments in AV. So what we are looking for are bolt-on opportunities that fit with our strategy and can accelerate our organic path, right? Good examples of that would be what we’ve announced in Turkey with Trendyol Go and Getir. And recently, we acquired SpotHero on the mobility side as well. Those are the sort of acquisitions that you should be looking at us doing.

Then, as we’ve done those things, we still are left with a lot of cash to ensure that we continue to return capital to shareholders. And last year, we returned more than $6 billion. We continue to remain on that kind of a footing for this year. The refinement that you should look for is that we will look at dislocations in our stock, and when we find those opportunities, we’ll be aggressive. And we are not looking for it to be a steady every quarter kind of a buyback. And I said this on the earnings call as well. We think our stock is dislocated right now, and we are being aggressive, right?

And then the final piece there then is we’re doing all of these things while retaining our investment-grade rating. We will maintain financial policies and liquidity that keep us in that place and allow us to expand on our strategy.” — Morgan Stanley conference (Mar-26)

68. “Every company should allocate capital smartly. Part of that capital allocation is M&A as we demonstrated with the proposed deal in Taiwan. But I think the way to get to attractive deals is, first of all, not to have to do a deal in the first place. So there’s a lot of energy that goes into organic growth of the company, because it allows us then to be picky in terms of inorganic growth. And I do think inorganic growth will be a part of the formula going forward, especially as capital markets become more difficult for smaller companies who can’t scale.” — Goldman conference (Sep-24)

69. “Yesterday, we announced an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in Turkey’s leading food delivery and grocery service, Trendyol GO, for approximately $700 million in cash. Trendyol GO generated $2 billion in Gross Bookings in 2024, and we expect the transaction to be accretive to Uber’s growth post-integration. We are excited at the prospect of combining Uber’s global marketplace expertise with Trendyol’s extensive coverage across Turkey and its deep relationships with beloved local merchants. We estimate that Turkey represents our third-largest untapped delivery market globally (after India and Brazil), with strong growth and underlying fundamentals. Our Mobility business in the country is also scaling quickly, and we look forward to bringing the power of the Uber platform to Turkish consumers, improving their product experience and supercharging business growth in the years ahead.” — Q1’25 prepared remarks

70. Interviewer: “What did you learn from Barry Diller?”

DK: “He’s incredible. He he’s been my business mentor and in many ways a personal mentor as well. I’d say that the thing that I learned from Barry is the value of getting the truth from the source material.

The way that he that I first met Barry, I was actually an analyst at Allen and Company working on the LBO model for Paramount. There was a hostile tender offer from Viacom for Paramount. I was building out the LBO model, right? Barry didn’t want to talk to the MD or the VP or the associate. He’s like, ‘Who built the model?’ And ‘I’m going to talk to that guy’ because if I’m going to raise billions of dollars in debt, I want to know I’m good for it. And I just remember I was like sweating. I was so nervous. I’m like trying to print out this model. And I took him through it and and he wanted to hear straight from the source. And every time I’ve witnessed him and I worked for him for 20 plus years, you know, it’s the filtering that gets the edge out of the story or out of the situation.

And it’s often the edge that gives you an edge. It’s not the the the average. Everyone is going to have the same reaction to the average. It’s what’s that 20%. What’s what’s that P95 situation, etc. So Barry always insisted on going to the source, getting unfiltered data. It was sometimes unpleasant. It took more time. But getting to the ground truth would help his decision-making and would allow him to get that edge to go against the grain.

And I’ve taken that with me. You know, I’ve seen in larger companies, like, most people who are run companies — they’re smart, they’re capable, they’re driven. And the failure that I see with most companies is that, you know, the higher up you are in an organization, often you get like a very thin layer of what’s going on. And everything has been processed for you. Like my schedule today, it’s determined by a bunch of well-meaning people who want to get me the best information and have me use my time in the best way. But it’s processed. And so, it’s very important for you to cut through that process sometimes and get to that ground truth. You’ve got to create some randomness in your interactions and your information flow. And Barry often painfully kind of drove to that source.

And it’s always for me been a very, very important part of how I manage, which is that the best way to get to the truth is, first of all, as a leader — tell the truth. So I’m brutally frank with my team. What’s going on? What’s good? What’s bad? What’s okay? Where do I not know the answers. And that helps me then get that truth back from them. Sometimes it requires me to dig and that can be unpleasant both for me and the team. But getting to the ground truth is something that I learned for Barry and and it’s always stuck with me.” — Invest Like the Best (Jun-26)

71. “Probably the most interest the most important lesson I learned at Allen & Company wasn’t mathematical. It wasn’t based on models, etc., it was — I remember Herbert Allen always talking about how he bet on people. He’s like, ‘Good companies come and go. Good people stay good. Just bet on good people in your life and you’ll be fine.’ And so, it is a bank and they make money the way banks do — through fees, etc. But they really build their relationships, personal relationships with their clients over a period of time. They tell clients what they don’t want to hear. And so for me, an appreciation of these relationships and betting on people in my life, both personally and professionally, it’s probably the biggest lesson I learned at Allen, funny enough.” — HD in HD podcast (Nov-25)