Uber put forth the aim of providing self-driving cars along with charging, parking, ride-hailing service, car-sharing, and multimodal transport. According to Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, driverless cars will not only transform the way we live but will also make our cities more livable. Uber is aiming at more than getting car rides, it wants to become the “Amazon of Transportation”.
Uber will undergo initial public offering and looking at the current status, it looks like this will be one of the biggest share offering in the tech sector. This cash injection is expected to close at the end of this year.
Toyota, along with the investment fund SoftBank vision fund, has invested $1 billion in the cause. Toyota has already been investing in companies that aim to produce self-driving cars and has already invested a good $500 million.
DENSO, a Japanese parts maker along with Toyota, has invested $667 million to help Uber achieve its target while the remaining $333 million were poured in by SoftBank. SoftBank already owns 16 percent of Uber’s shares. Toyota claims that in the coming three years it will pitch in an additional $300 million for the venture.
The “sharing economy” theory that uber has devised is working wonders for the company. Its revenue grew up to as much as 42 percent last year (11.2 billion), however, due to some losses they could only get their hands on $3 billion in profit. On the other side, Uber eats, devised on the same theory is growing successful day by day.
The company’s chief executive has promised transparency and just last week, the official documents for the share offering were filed. They showed that uber operates in six continents, has more than 10 billion rides since 2010 and the number of rides in a continent goes up to as much as 14 million per day.
Last month, wall street journal posted about Uber wanting to raise $10 billion for one of its ventures. Another media report also said that Uber seeking a market valuation of $100 billion.
