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Top Story: Uber FY2025 numbers + AV Roadmap

Uber published Q4 and FY2025 results - key takeaways: 

For full year 2025, gross booking, revenue and adjusted EBITDA grew. These numbers are in million; revenue is $52 billion, Adjusted EBITDA is $8.7 billion. That is a lot of money.

When diving in to Q4/25 results:

For the investor presentation.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber relaunches in Macau, China. Uber sold its Chinese operations to DiDi back in 2016, and exited Macau in 2017. This news is especially interesting for three reasons:

As with anything in China - it is plausible - but not certain. Never underestimate the power of US-China politics on business decision making. To be continued. 

Uber pulls out of Tanzania after years of struggle with local regulation. Government guided prices (fixed, non-dynamic) and an up to 15% commission meant the market had limited potential. In Q3/25 Uber exited the Ivory Coast, also facing regulatory hurdles. In Kenya, some users are having a hard time without Visa. Take a look at a map of African countries Uber & Careem are active in. 

Grab partners with China based Hesai Technology to exclusively distribute LiDAR products in Southeast Asia. Grab is all-in on autonomous technology - the company invested in WeRide, May Mobility and Vay and partnered with Autonomous A2Z, Motional and Zelos. Now the company is diversifying into hardware. 

GoCab, fintech offering drivers in emerging markets a “drive-to-own” model, raises $45M. Of that, $15M is in equity and $30M is in debt. Money will be used to expand EV fleet and presence in Africa. 

Ruter’s self-driving pilot turns 1 year old.

In Arizona, Uber was help liable in a driver sexual assault case and ordered to pay $8.5M in compensation. The jury found that Uber was liable because the driver was acting as an “apparent agent” of the company during the incident, but it did not find Uber liable for negligence or design defects. The compensation paid is less than the $144M damages requested. Uber plans to appeal the decision. There are around 3,000 more lawsuits waiting to go to court across the US. In a similar case in California Uber was found NOT liable, so the future is unclear. 

Waymo introduces Waymo World Model - a generative model for large-scale, hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulation - built on Google’s DeepMind Genie 3. The new model will allow Waymo to test extreme weather, rare safety events and, well, everything. 

Tesla moved ‘safety monitors’ from the vehicle - and put them in a trailing car.

Vert wins Gold Environment Award at the Pro Driver Media QSi Awards - 2nd year running. Ukrainian Railways partners with Uklon and Bolt to offer taxi discounts for delayed trains. An account of robotaxi rides in China. 

A Wayve car runs a red light. Video. The irony: the car drove Alex Kendall, Wayve’s CEO, on its way to receive an OBE. To be fair - many drivers would have done the same. Bosch autonomous test vehicle, mapping city roads for Audi’s autonomous driving stack,  spotted in Helsinki. Abu Dhabi expands operations of the WeRide-Uber robotaxis to Khalifa City, Masdar City and Rabdan, with a plan to add 1,200 vehicles. Waymo arrives in Nashville. Baidu’s RT6 taxis operations officially launched in Dubai. 

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

Ohmio launches in Solihull, UK. The autonomous service operates on a 7-km public route. Liftango provides the passenger and routing elements. 

New 26-seat autonomous ADL bus with Fusion Processing tech has entered passenger service as part of the Connector trial in Cambridge, UK.

Urban Foresight is running demo rides as part of an autonomous feasibility project on Orkney Island, Scotland. The project, for now running between the local harbor and airport with a Aurrigo shuttle, aims to determine to what extent electric autonomous shuttles can replace the private car and support rural communities.  

BusForFun announced as an official retailer of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games tickets. The company offers transportation solutions next to the event ticketing.

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Zipcar, a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, lays off 126 US employees and merges its HQ; Zipcar is leaving Boston (current HQ) and will operate out of the Avis HQ in New Jersey. Also recently Zipcar shocked London with a decision to leave the city, where it once operated >3,000 vehicles. These are cost cutting consolidation moves, signaling reduced carsharing focus and appetite for investment. 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Donkey Republic to raise €10M via private placement as it prepares to uplist for the Nasdaq Copenhagen Main Market. Funds will be used to launch two newly won contracts, totalling deployment of 8,000 new vehicles, and to improve balance sheet; additional debt will be taken to support preparation for the launch of the two tenders. 

Nextbike wins Munich’s public bike share contract - deployment of 7,000 bikes and e-bikes. Lime scales up Milan operations ahead of the Winter Olympics. Beryl introduces new connected pedal bike. 

What went wrong with e-bikes? Cowboy, Rad Power Bikes and VanMoof raised hundreds of millions and valued north of $1 billion - only to go bankrupt and sold in distress. And there are many more smaller brand names - which also failed to scale. 

Cheap VC money caused companies to sell at loss, launch new products without adequate QA and invest in international expansion to grow fast; that translates to money burn. When COVID hit, supply chain challenges hurt customers (think spare parts) which led to increased warranty costs (think inadequate QA) and bad customer experience. When the pandemic faded, it turned out that demand shrunk. And finally, Trump’s tariffs meant that bikes were not not sellable in the US, as the vast majority were built, or had parts produced, in China. Now these companies are thinking about quality, supply chains and mainly - profitability - and are going back to market. 

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Meituan, China’s largest food delivery and quick commerce platform, acquires DingDong Fresh (NYSE: DDL), dark store-focused quick commerce company. COVID boom which relaxed in the last few years and fierce competition from larger players meant that the deal was right for both sides, with Meituan enhancing operational strength. Interestingly, the deal was only for DingDong’s China business - the company is still active independently overseas. See analysis here. 

Tencent invests in Neolix. While less developed in the Western World, Robovans is a fast growing segment in China. 

Pedal & Post, a cargo-bike delivery logistics company operating in London and Oxford, closes after 14 years. P&P to join Zedify (administration) and Packfleet (transferred operations to DHL), two other low-emission London-based companies who closed shop in the past year. 

How effective are delivery drones in medical deliveries? Not so much according to this study. While drones can save on time (even this is debatable), they increase costs by more than double; are weather dependent and therefore unreliable (thus requiring to keep the ‘legacy’ ground business running, adding even more costs); have not to reach required levels of automation for scaled operations; and are not always needed - in many medical procedures it doesn’t matter if the delivery gets 1-2 hours before or not. 

Swiggy Q3/26 results: 

See how Zipline manages delivery operations at the ground pickup station. Zipline has recently been producing cool videos which shed light on drone operations. 

Baemin adds multilingual, AI-powered support to serve foreigners in South Korea. Languages supported today are English, Chinese, and Japanese. 

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Bedrock Robotics raises $270M on a $1.75 billion valuation, to power autonomous construction. Funds will be used to accelerate, well, growth. 

Aston University and Aurrigo partner to help self-driving baggage and cargo vehicles make decisions autonomously.

In other news 📰

Overland AI raises $100M to scale ground autonomy with the U.S. Armed Forces. 

Apeiron Labs, autonomous underwater robots, raises $9.5M to understand more about oceans. Apeiron is building low-cost vehicles that travel 400 meters up and down the water column, sampling temperature, salinity, and acoustics. Funds will be used to grow the fleet. 

China bans hidden electric car door handles; from January 2027, all cars sold must have a mechanically released external door handle. Over in the US, Tesla is being sued for that same handle, as people simply cannot escape burning cars or are late to be rescued in accidents. This is super important regulation - one that must be adopted in the Western World and can save lives. 

A Glenn Mercer reminder of the Marchetti/Zahavi constant - that people choose to travel 70 minutes a day (or, roughly 30 minutes commute per way). This number cross cultures and time, from ancient Greece to modern India

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Cemre Kavvasoglu is the new North America Operations Director @ ADASTEC. 

Gabe Klein is the new Advisory Board Chair @ Third Lane Mobility (Bird/Spin).

Kamran Chaudhry is the new Director of FP&A @ Blacklane. 

Weiser Manzano is the new Sr. Manager of Transportation at Golden States Warriors.

Congrats and good luck!

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