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#movingpeople and myself are going on holiday. I’ll use the time to both rest and to prepare a new newsletter format. TBC. I’ll see you back on September 7th. Enjoy August!
Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕
Uber Q2/26 financial report, key takeaways:
The press release emphasized: “... trailing twelve-month free cash flow exceeded $10 billion for the first time in Uber’s history - giving us the flexibility… investing from a position of strength, as we accelerate our cross-platform strategy at a global scale and build the world’s largest platform for autonomous vehicle”.
Uber’s Q2/26 will be remembered for the Delivery Hero acquisition (closing next year) and for the Waymo “divorce”.
Trips up 18% YoY to 3.9 billion
Monthly Active Platform Consumers (“MAPCs”) up 16% to 208 million
Gross bookings up 24% to $58 billion
Revenue up 12% to $14.2 billion. Note that revenue grew, but less than gross bookings did.
Revenue margin in Q2/26 is 24.46%, vs. 27.06% in Q2/25
Net income $2.4 billion
Mobilty | Delivery | |
|---|---|---|
Gross Bookings | 28,988 | 27,463 |
Revenue | 7,363 | 5,245 |
Margin | 25.4% | 19.1% |
Lyft Q2/26 financial report, key takeaways:
Freenow is expanding its business - the latest quarter saw the acquisitions of Gett and Serveoʼs bikeshare business in Spain, as the company continues to expand to new geographies and products,
Rides up 11.7%, to 262.4 million
Active riders up 16.8%, to 30.5 million
Gross bookings up 23% to $5.5 billion
Revenue up 16%, to $1.8 billion
Revenue margin of 33.5%
Net income up 25% to $50.3M
Grab Q2/26 report:
Grab had a “quiet” quarter, after announcing the acquisition of foodpanda Taiwan at the very end of Q1; expected to close by end of year.
GMV up 21% to $6.5 billion
Revenue up 22% to $997M
Operating profit $19M
Deliveries | Mobility | Financial Services | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GMV or Gross Loan Portfolio | 4,249 | 2,214 | 2,318 | 6,463 |
Revenue | 531 | 331 | 134 | 997 |
Margin | 12.5% | 14.95% | 5.78% | 15.43% |
Segment Adjusted EBITDA | 191 | 96 | -15 | 168 |
Uber and Wayve receive TfL approval for supervised (safety drivers) robotaxi service in London. Launch date TBD - but probably very soon!
The regulatory regime under which this scheme operates sees vehicles licensed as PHV (Private Hire Vehicles), under the existing Uber operating licence, not as automated vehicles, which is a different regulatory route, one that Waymo is pursuing. This means that a licensed driver must be present at all times. Up to 15 vehicles were approved by TfL.
Moove is still very much a human-driven company - it owns and operates a 42,000-vehicle ride-hailing fleet across 13 countries, providing vehicle financing to gig drivers
ARR of $420M
In Autonomy, Moove is the fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami, Las Vegas and London
Moove’s goal is to own “hundreds of thousands of robotaxis”. The company does not currently own any Waymo vehicles (Waymo owns those), but it does so for different, unnamed, AV developer.
GreenMobility, car-sharing/rental, partners with WeRide to bring fully driverless cars to Denmark in H1/27. This isn’t a first for GreenMobility: back in November 2025 the company signed a similar agreement with Tensor. My analysis:
Autonomy presents both a threat and an opportunity for the shared/rental industry. A threat, because share/rental demand generation as we know it today will transform with autonomy - companies will find themselves competing against Uber, Waymo and the likes for customers. The opportunity - to utilise existing customer base and network to create a new car-asset business, one that offers shared/rental but is also available for robotaxi use to increase asset utilisation.
Car-share needs to act quicker than rental. It’s the ODD. Car-share companies are active in dense urban environments, the kind that robotaxis look for first. It will take many years before autonomous cars can drive across countries, the way rental cars do. For now, the traditional rental business model is safe.
To illustrate my two points - this isn’t the first such partnership. Poppy in Belgium and Miles in Germany are exploring autonomy, and this week South Korean Socar announced a similar plan.
Autonomous A2Z signed an autonomous driving contract worth roughly $8M with Space42, an AI company in the United Arab Emirates. Space42 will replace the TXAI service, which it has so far operated with Chinese-made autonomous vehicles, with A2Z vehicles. Waymo opens Dallas robotaxi service to the public, no more waiting list. Kazakhstan greenlights driverless vehicle tests in major cities. Expect InDrive and Yandex to operate in the country. Hyundai appoints new head of autonomous driving development centre.
For some reason, Waymo’s are dropping off people on a quiet residential street, two miles from the San Francisco international airport, instead of at the airport itself. Interesting read: “Why Waymos keep driving into floods” - a guest post by Sanjay Kumar for The Driverless Digest.
#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.
Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌
Via Q2/26 financial report, key takeaways (8-K, 10-Q, presentation):
Growth: In the short term, Via’s revenue growth (“S-curve”) comes from cross-selling its platform, which today consists of Via’s on-demand solution, Remix (planning), and Citymapper (MaaS, or execution). Longer term, Via expects growth to come from expansion into the US school market and from its AI lab operations - which will create yet another cross-selling opportunity to its customer base
Revenue up 27% to $135.7M (107.1M YoY)
Gross profit up one percentage point, to 41%, at $55.6M
Operating loss grew to $21.7M, from a $16.1M loss in Q2/25; operating expenses grew from $58M in Q2/25 to $77.3M in Q2/26. This is attributed to post-IPO compensation, increase in sales & Mmarketing activities, insurance costs and additional personnel.
Adjusted EBITDA loss of $3.4M, better than a $9M loss in Q2/25
Net loss $19.5M, better than $21.2M in Q2/25
Imagry, autonomous bus technology, partners with UNVI, Spanish bus manufacturer, to offer fully integrated autonomous electric buses for public transportation. The first integrated bus is set for deployment in Germany in Q3/26 (i.e. very soon).
Autonomy London, March 2027. I’ll be there, and so will many autonomous leaders and operators. Register to speak or sign up to attend using MOVINGPEOPLE10 for a 10% discount.
Micromobility 🚲🛴
Lime Q2/26 financial report, key takeaways:
Revenue up 24% to $304M
Gross margin declined from 44.3% in Q2/25 to 42.4% in Q2/26
Operating expenses grew from $67.5M to $116.2M, with sales, G&A and R&D all growing substantially
Adjusted EBITDA $84M, up from $76.2M YoY
Operating profit, $12.8M, down from $41.5M YoY
Loss before taxes of $3M - but then recognizing a tax provision released for the company an additional (one-time) $298.4M and brought it into profitability.
Italy’s competition authority fines Bird (€750k), Dott (€525k) and Lime (€1.4M) a total of €2.7M for unfair commercial practices. In the 2023 Rome tender, the companies committed to a free ride benefit for annual pass holders, which they made unduly difficult to access.
Forest introduces third-party liability insurance. The same coverage is being offered by fellow London operators Lime, Bolt and Santander, and Voi for scooters. Costs are estimated at one-third of a penny per minute.
Uklon completes acquisition of e-Wings, a leading electric scooter operator in Ukraine.
Veo debuts its newly developed shared electric trike, the “Rover”, in Denver. The Rover can travel up to 45 miles (~70 km/h) on a single charge and reach a top speed of 15 mph (24 km/h).
Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺
Are Uber and Serve Robotics heading for a breakup? On its Q2 earnings call, Serve signaled that it does not currently expect to renew its commercial agreement with Uber, when it expires in early 2027. Serve’s CEO mentioned “lower-than-expected utilisation and necessary changes to its operating model”. What does that mean:
“Utilisation” is straightforward - not enough orders have been routed to Serve, which means something is broken in the ways both companies see future work together. This is critical - Serve cut its FY2026 revenue guidance from $26M to just $9–10M.
“Operating model” is why orders have declined in the first place. At the core, Serve wants to be a multi-platform autonomous logistics operator - while Uber wants autonomous operators to plug into Uber's marketplace and operating infrastructure.
Serve increasingly wants | Uber increasingly wants |
|---|---|
Control over its fleet utilisation | Control over marketplace dispatch |
Ability to move robots between Uber, DoorDash, direct merchants, etc. | Ability to choose the best fulfilment mode for each Uber order |
More direct merchant integration | Merchant relationship centred on Uber |
Higher orders/robot/hour | Optimization of the whole Uber network, not Serve |
Meanwhile, Serve is expanding its DoorDash partnership and is soon to announce a new partnership. Uber works with multiple other delivery bot companies - Avride, Cartken, Coco, Starship - and with drones. This step means more for Serve than it does to Uber.
Also happened this week: Zipline launches Ohio prescription drone delivery service.
AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜
Atlas and Kodiak expand autonomous trucking across the Permian Basin. The companies plan to increase fleet to 100 driverless trucks (from 28 today) by mid-2027, add a new logistic stop on the existing service and begin operating on public roads.
Caterpillar sues Bluelight Machines, construction autonomy, for allegedly violating five paving patents for compaction and autonomous operation. Bluelight isn’t caving and is fighting back - see open letter by the CEO.
I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.
In other news 📰
Travis Kalanick is back to mobility, with Atoms, his new company. At first, Kalanick was focused on food and infrastructure, bringing together:
CloudKitchens: ghost kitchen real estate network
Otter: restaurant management and operations software
Picnic: office lunch and catering
Lab37: food production and automated bowl-building robotics
ProFood Properties: institutional real estate owner and developer that builds industrial-scale food production and cold-chain storage facilities
And lately expanding into mobility and infrastructure, with:
Pronto: heavy-industry autonomy and robotics
And the latest agreement with Joby - to acquire and develop a network of vertiports (heliports for eVTOLs) across the US
Google Maps adds agentic AI features to its app, including the ability to order food, book hotels, and find event tickets. So far Maps has been a transport and search focused app (MaaS + Google search), with limited focus on ordering or booking through the app. Is this about to change?
Lucid’s new CEO turnaround plans focus on spending reduction, completing its AMP-2 factory in Saudi Arabia, launching to market the mid-sized EV and following up on its robotaxi program with Uber and Nuro.
Indian electric vehicle startup River raises $120M to scale manufacturing.
Ford’s next-generation electric truck will be called Fathom, and it will start at $28,350 (exc. delivery) when it goes on sale in 2027. For comparison, Slate truck starts at $24,950 (exc. delivery).
Thiago Soares Figueira, former GM of Zity, with two additional posts on charging and cleaning a fleet of 600 electric vehicles, leveraging call centres & the importance of outsourcing; and the importance of choosing the right depot.
A "Dear John" letter to c2c by Christiane Link details the challenges disabled people face with public transport. The daily dependency on a tuned system is critical - this wasn’t the case.
People 🧑🤝🧑
Dror Lev Yosef is the new Public transportation planner and UX specialist @ Exact Transportation Solutions Ltd.
João Afonso is the new Director | Sales, Operations & Remarketing @ AUTO1 Group.
Marco Amico is the new Global Head of B2B @ Travelier.
Sophie Buyse is the new Head of international long-distance passenger transport @ DB Fernverkehr.
Congrats and good luck!
Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.
