Uber $13.5bn, Lyft $1.7bn, Grab $873M, Dott €85M, Voi €57.5M, Upway $60M

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy dedicated to "All Things Mobility", focused on growth.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber released its Q3/25 financial report, key takeaways: 

• Gross Bookings $49.7 billion (+21% YoY); 3.5 billion trips (+22% YoY)

• Revenue $13.5 billion (+20% YoY). That comes out to be 27.1% of gross bookings; lower than the 27.3% YoY

• Income from Operations $1.1 billion (+5% YoY)

* Corporate G&A and Platform R&D Adjusted EBITDA: (683)

Uber showed weak profits this quarter, which the company attributes to undisclosed legal and regulatory matters; the stock market sent the stock down by circa 8%.  

Lyft released its Q3/25 financial report, key takeaways: 

• Gross bookings $4.8 billion (+16% YoY); 248.8 million rides (+15% YoY)

• Revenue $1.7 billion (+11% YoY), roughly 35% of gross bookings

• Income from Operations $23M (vs. a negative $56.7M in Q3/24)

Also busy Q for Lyft, announcing Waymo Nashville partnership; the Tensor ‘Lyft-ready” AV partnership; and the acquisition of Chauffeur company TBR Global, for £83M. The stock market reacted positively to the report. 

Grab released its Q3/25 financial report, key takeaways: 

• GMV $5.77 billion (+24% YoY); 

• Revenue $873M (+22% YoY), 15.2% of GMV

• Operating profit $27M, (vs. a negative $38M in Q3/24)

The stock market wasn’t too excited about the results. 

Stellantis (cars), Nvidia (AV tech), Foxconn (hardware?) and Uber (ride-hailing) partner to create a robotaxi brand. Production is planned for 2028, starting with 5,000 vehicles in the US. As AV regulation unlocks, the bottle neck seems to be in the vehicle supply, and Uber is quickly owning as much supply as possible. 

Uber to launch robotaxis in San Francisco, the first city in which the Lucid & Nuro partnership goes live. Many frame this as Uber going head to head with Waymo - but it is the other way around - Waymo “invaded” Uber’s ride-hailing turf, taking market share from Uber (& Lyft).

Waymo announces three new cities: Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego. This brings the total of new US cities planned to 11, with previous announcements including Boston, Denver, Miami, Nashville, Seattle, New York and Washington, D.C. The company has also started testing on highways and is getting ready for winter. Waymo targets 1 million rides a week by the end of 2026; the latest data point - 250k rides a week - was given back in April. Waymo also hires lobbyists in Canada and is hiring in Japan. 

Baidu says it hit 250,000 rides a week on its Apollo Go AV platform, up from roughly 170,000 back in June. Apollo Go operates in Wuhan, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and has international presence in Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Switzerland.

Pony.ai granted Shenzhen’s first city-wide license for fully-driverless commercial Robotaxi operations, together with Xihu Group, taxi company. Future years (how many?) will see 1,000 robotaxis deployed in the city. 

Hyundai acquired Motional and 42dot to advance its autonomous plans - with not much to show for so far. A new partnership with Nvidia might help. DeepRoute.ai plans to launch robotaxi operations using consumer-grade production vehicles by the end of 2025. Tesla covers up robotaxi accidents. Australia plans to set autonomous regulation in 2027. May Mobility in Japan. 

A vehicle attempted a left turn against a red light, which led to a collision with another vehicle and then a Waymo vehicle. Earlier last week I interviewed Ziv Binyamini, CEO of Foretellix, maker of autonomous safety software, about exactly this - the breadth of situations an AV can find itself in, and how to get the industry ready. For that, and more about the recent integration with Nvidia, in here: 

Uklon is negotiating an M&A deal with Jet, micromobility; the deal is stuck on price. A deal would expand Uklon’s product range, focused today on car-based ride-hailing. Other companies in the micromobility space are also being considered. 

CaoCao (ride-hailing from the Geely Group) stats: 163 cities across China; average of 38.1 million monthly active users; over 37,000 purpose-built vehicles in operation across more than 30 cities.

Uber in Estonia - Bolt’s territory - partnering with Tallinn Airport (TLL). Uber to invest $20M in Indian-based Everest Fleet, bringing the total to $50M; pre-money is expected to remain $420M. Everest Fleet operates ±18.500 vehicles, working with Uber, Ola and the likes. Uber live in Barbados. Uber signs sponsorship deal with Barca; meanwhile in Barcelona, taxi rules continue to toughen. 

DiDi launches EV service in Mexico City. The service, launched with an initial fleet of 500 luxury vehicles, is named DiDi Premier. Yango and Etihad Rail sign MoU on first/last mile transport. How Uber and Bolt’s vehicle requirements differ in South Africa. TVS Motor sold its entire stake in Rapido to Prosus and Accel. Lyft and United Airlines partner on a loyalty program. 

FACTUAL is planning a AV trip to China, visiting the likes of WeRide, Pony.ai and Baidu. Click below to find out more.

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

Beep and Adastec partner on Atlanta (Georgia) and Altamonte Springs (Florida) deployments, planned for 2026. The partnership also includes Karsan (OEM) and Damera (distributor). 

AmiGo is the name of Switzerland's new AV rural transport service, using Baidu’s tech. Mapping to begin in December; test rides in 2026; full service, with 25 vehicles, in 2027. Liability, when fully autonomous, is on Baidu. Interesting. Who is the insurer? 

Liftango, together with Clever Devices and Optai, to implement ITS technology in order to optimise São Paulo’s public transport, from scheduling to real time passenger information to vehicle health. Liftango will add technology to the city’’s fleet of 4,800 school and paratransit buses. 

SWVL reports Q3/25 net profit of $210k, its third consecutive profitable quarter. GO-Shuttle is a new on-demand ridepooling service in Japan. Routematic launches new operations command centre, its 4th. 

Transit now allows you to track diversion in Liverpool. Obviously planned diversions are easier to track; for unplanned diversions, Transit uses real time tracking to identify diversions and a machine learning model builds the new route based on existing and past data.

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

BlaBlaCar is big in India, with the country accounting for 33% of BlaBlaCar’s global carpool passengers. Outside of the French speaking world, BlaBla has succeeded in emerging markets, such as India, Turkey and Brazil. In India, high smartphone penetration, digital payments push and limited public transport service have made the (so far non-monetised) service a success. 

Carguru initiates a €5M bond - to grow fleet, boost tech, and bring ride-hailing & mobility platform to the whole Baltics.

The Boadilla (Spain) service is marking 1 year:

• WiBLE, Voltio and ZITY operate in the city

• A total of 18,200 trips and 788,000 km (avg. of 43.3 km per trip)

• Mainly used for trip outside of the municip;alicy, Madrid leads with 60% of trips to it

• Airport to/from is also a likely use case

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Voi releases Q/25 financial report, key takeaways: 

• Net revenue €57.5M (+34% YoY), fueled by 135.3 vehicles (+35% YoY) and 37k rides (+57% YoY)

• Operating profit €8.1M (+9.5% YoY)

• Increased focus on e-bikes; Paris and the UK as major growth markets 

Dott raises €85M to acquire new vehicles and upgrade existing deployment - €70M in bond and €15M equity in an extended Series D. 

Upway, refurbishing e-bikes, raises $60M to expand geo footprint and build new ‘UpCenters’ and to launch new digital services in financing, insurance, maintenance, and subscriptions. 

In Japan, Luup is requiring user consent for the police to share traffic violations with the company. Lime rolls out 500 e-bikes with child seats in Paris. 

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

Uber is said to be in talks to buy Getir’s delivery business in Turkey. Back in May Uber acquired a majority stake in Trendyol Go, food and grocery delivery platform, for $700M. A few weeks ago, TikTak acquired Getir’s car-share business. Mubdala is almost done selling the business?

Also Uber will invest $200M in a tech hub in Turkey over the span of five years. 

Maituan is looking to raise $3 billion in bonds, to manage expansion and win China competition. Chowdeck fulfilled over 1 million orders in October. Daily orders grow lately from 30k to 40k a day. JET partners with Tesco to power its rapid delivery service, Tesco Whoosh, across the UK, as well as support other Tesco brands, One Stop and Booker. Zelostech launches its autonomous logistics products with DHL.  

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Waabi unveils autonomous truck made in partnership with Volvo. 

Aurora will resume human-less operations early next year.

In other news 📰

Waymo killed KitKat - a beloved San Francisco neighbourhood cat - which sparked a rage against the (AV) machines. The cat, a resident at a local liquor store, was survived by a handful of articles and a reference made by Elon Musk.

Beta debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $1 billion on a $7.4 billion valuation. Beta wants to be an industry OEM, developing both an e-plane and an e-helicopter (eVTOL). Also Beta delivers jet to New Zealand. 

Archer buys Hawthorne Airport, located 3 miles (5 km) from LAX, for $126M in cash. Archer plans for the airport to serve as its operational hub for its planned LA air taxi network (and as a flight test centre). Hawthorne is a 10 minute drive from LAX, or a few minutes flight. Seeing that the key use cases for eVTOLs are expected to be Airport taxi and/or medical transfers, the first one requires arrival to a main airport and the 2nd depends on plane size, this makes perfect sense. 

Google Maps integrates Gemini to allow users to interact with maps via voice and to give directions based on landmarks, not  distance (e.g. turn right after the gas station). 

How Porsche went from 9-month operating profit of €4 billion to €40 million. 

Rivian creates Mind Robotics, another spinoff company, focusing on industrial AI robotics. 

Ruter, Norway’s Public Transport Company, discovers Chinese backdoor remote access capabilities in Yutong buses, which allow Yutong to control or shut down the buses via software updates. Albeit a theoretical scenario, nevertheless a cyber security threat. Norway operates hundreds of Yutong buses; the government is looking into the issue. 

Electreon launches wireless charging on A10 highway. Running on a 1.5km stretch of road, charging anything from cars to trucks, at up to 300kW.  

Here is what you need to be doing to earn $1 trillion in 10 years (or, an embarrassingly low bonus of $100 billion annually, pre-tax, without any salary): 

• Deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles and one million robots

• Get 10 million subscriptions to Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature

• Bring one million self-driving Robotaxi vehicles into commercial operation

• Earn up to $400 billion in core profit

• Lift Tesla's overall market value to $8.5tn, currently $1.4tn

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

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Alban Gelix is the new Head of Business Development @ Distribusion Technologies. 

Beata Szoboszlai is the new Head of Operations @ TRL Software. 

Daniel Goff is the new Vice President External Affairs @ Kodiak. 

David Rooney is the new Head of Commercial Bids @ Arriva Road Transport Services. 

Dimitrios Thanos is the new Senior Consultant Transport & Mobility @ Trapico GmbH. 

Polyvios Polyviou is the new Head of Highways & Sustainable Transport Policy @ Southwark Council. 

Richard Donkor is the new UK B2B Business Manager @ Mobilisights (a Stellantis Company). 

S. Ehsan Salari Is the new Transport Adviser @ Tehran Transportation and Traffic org. 

Shlomi Tamam is the new Chief Product, Import & Supply @ Shlomo Motors. 

Vikki Townsend (Street) is the new Director of Operator Partnerships @ Zeelo.  

Congrats and good luck!

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

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