Uber. Waymo. DoorDash. Wonder. Aurora. Autonomous & Delivery rapidly evolving.

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Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT  🚙🚐

Grab publishes Q1/25 results, and it is looking good: 

• Delivery and ride-hailing GMV grew 16% (YoY, all data is YoY) to $4.93 billion; users also grew by 16%, to 44.5 million

• Revenue grew 18% to $773M, above analysts expectations

• Adjusted EBITDA $106M, increase of $44M

• Delivery revenue rose by 18% to $415M; ride-hailing revenue grew 15%, contributing an additional $285M

• Revenue from financial services is $75M, growing 36%

• For more. 

Grab is also moving toward to a deal with GoTo (Gojek), closing expected in Q2. A deal between the two would see the combined entity hold 85% of the region’s $8 billion market; expect regulators to scrutinise the deal. 

Uber publishes Q1/25 results, misses revenue expectations, but looking good: 

• Trips grew 18% YoY to 3 billion

• Gross bookings grew 14% to $42.8 billion (quick math: avg. of ±$14.1 per trip)

• Revenue also up 14% to $11.5 billion (quick math: 26.9% commission)

• Free cash flow is $2.3 billion

• Mobility contributed 49.5% of gross booking and 56.3% of revenue

• Delivery contributed 47.6% of gross bookings and 32.7% of revenue

• Freight contributed 11% of revenue, $1.26 billion. We don’t really hear a lot about freight, but it is a over $1 billion business. 

• For the 8-K and 10-Q. 

Lyft publishes Q1/25 results, looking… very good. 

• Rides up 16% YoY to 218.4M

• Gross bookings up 13% to $4.16 billion ($19 per ride; higher than Uber but remember Lyft is only in North America)

• Revenue grew 14% to $1.45 billion (34.8% take home!)

• Active riders grew 11% to 24.2 million

• Net income of $2.57M (Q1/24 saw a net loss of $31.5M)

• The company also increased its share repurchase program to $750M, sending the stock up high

• For the 8-K and 10-Q.  

Routematic, Indian employee transport solution, raises $40M. The company operates in 23 cities across India, serving over 300 corporates. This is a big raise in the industry; Shuttl was the last one to raise such a considerable amount. That ended with the pandemic. 

BP, responsAbility and other existing BluSmart investors, are trying to revive the company by wiling to inject $30M into it in the form of unsecured debt. The condition: that BluSmart’s co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi will resign. BluSmart, with its 8,700 vehicles, is currently not active. Meanwhile, Uber ends talks to onboard BluSmart’s cars, due to high valuation and regulatory concerns. 

Ola is also on a downward spiral. Vanguard (PE) cut Ola’s valuation to $1.25 billion, 80% down from peak. With ±30% market share, Ola has been consistently losing market share to Uber (±50%), Rapido (±15% in cab segment) and the likes. 

🇨🇳 China: DiDi leads ride-haling market with 75%, AMAP with 20%, and the rest is divided between 360 different apps. Read an interview I had with Lock Tang, VP of the Chinese ride-haling association. Also wasn’t covered in that talk, Xiangdao, the ride-hailing arm of SAIC, raises $180M to expand. The company is active in over 100 cities, offering both corporate and private consumer ride-hailing. 

Flix is expanding to Mexico. Lalamove enters Pattaya, Thailand. BusUp adds another €2.84M investment; the company manages 700,000 monthly rides (riders). Yango Ethiopia partners with Amigos MFI, microfinance cooperative society, to launch an EV Financing program for drivers. DiDi partners with Oxxo Gas to offer drivers with benefits. In Tanzania, ‘Ghost Rides’ (when a driver falsely reports picking up a rider) is a problem. Bolt is solving that with a pickup code. The local government of Sindh, Pakistan, is looking to integrate all ride-hailing apps under one roof. InDrive and Maxim receive notice of revocation in Malaysia, for allegedly operating illegally. The companies can appeal, the Transport Minister has the final say. 🇬🇧 UK: Uber now accepts cash in the UK, excluding London. Freenow expands to Glasgow, UK. Cordic adds 3 more fleets. icabbi partners with Flip to offer Voice AI capabilities. 

DRT: Shotl partners with MAIOR, an Italian public transport planning company, with Shotl’s product entering the MAIOR suite of solutions. Nemi launches in Croatia, in a pilot set to improve transport connectivity in rural and peripheral regions. Via signs Wiltshire, UK, replacing ioki.

Lyft introduces Lyft Silver, an app for the older riders. The solution has human-staffed customer service support, uses vehicles easy to get in & out of and has a simplified UI. Today older riders constitute 5.4% of Lyft’s total customer base, and Lyft aims to grow that number. 

Forecast Demand. Maximise Revenue.

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We prefer working with your historical data – but that’s not a must. In the example above, we achieved 92% accuracy by testing our simulation model against actual historical data, using open and proprietary sources only to help us frame the right queries and scenarios.

See more on SWITCH’s website and welcome to ping us for more.   

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

PANEK suspends its car-sharing service. Car-sharing is an add-on to the core rental business, which is 80% of the combined operations revenue. The scheme was losing money, due to low utilisation (under 1 ride per day), oversupply and fierce competition with Traficar and Bolt Drive, high operating costs and lack of government support (such as parking or EV incentives). 

UC Riverside launches a hydrogen-powered carshare program, offering 13 Toyota Mirai. FINN to buy 5,300 new Stellantis vehicles.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

The city of Parma, Italy, allow free shared scooter and bike travel (Ridemovi) to people with “extra-urban bus pass”. This is a great example of how shared fleets integrate into the public transport network, and I’d love to see data on that in the future. 

Athens is regulating scooters, introducing designated parking areas, no scooter zones and speed limits. Who would have thought that 5 different operators without regulation would create a mess…

Dott starts buying scooters from NAVEE, diversifying from Segway. 

Rabbit Mobility hits 2 million rides, gaining 1 million over the past 8.5 months. RideMovi reaches 3 million rentals in Padua and introduces child seat. Fifteen - Augmented Bike Networks (1st time I hear of them!) adds 240 ebikes to its 700 mechanical bike fleet in Augsburg, Germany. Voi is bringing e-bikes to London. SURE Mobility partners with Fletcher Hotels, with 117 locations across the Netherlands. Initial roll-out to 32 hotels. 

Bird to relaunch in Ottawa, Canada, this time 24/7 and to more neighbourhoods. Bird is pulling out of Midland and Bay City, Michigan and from Whitewater, Wisconsin. This has to do with restructuring at Bird. 

Voi vs. Lime - insights from ATOM Mobility:

• Lime has a fleet size of 270k vehicles, avg. revenue for vehicle $2,541 and ride/vehicle/day is at 2.02

• Voi has a fleet of 93k vehicles, avg. revenue for vehicle €1,428 (+$1,548) and ride/vehicle/day is at 2.19

Delivery 🍽🧺

DoorDash acquires Deliveroo for £2.9 billion ($3.85bn) (X13 2025 EBITDA) and acquires SevenRooms for $1.2 billion. 

DoorDash is already present in Europe through Wolt, but there is zero overlap between the two companies. This acquisition allows DooDash entry into markets in Western Europe and the Gulf states, a total of 9 new countries. It makes perfect sense. DoorDash is now active in over 40 countries with circa 50 million monthly active users. 

SevenRooms is a guest experience management platform, focused on hospitality (i.e. restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues). This makes perfect sense in the restaurant domain, as DoorDash gets access to restaurants’ daily management, CRM and marketing tools, allowing the company more data on individual users. This can be used for cross-channel loyalty programs, or to offer users dine-in/delivery based on restaurant capacity. The acquisition is more challenging in the hotel space; while there are clear benefits (such as hotel restaurant delivery), hotels are likely to be more worried concerning their data. TBC. 

Uber buys a 85% controlling stake in Turkish Trendyol GO, a food delivery business, for $700M. In 2024, Trendyol GO delivered over 200 million order for a gross bookings of roughly $2 billion; the company has 90,000 restaurants and 19,000 couriers on its platform. 

Wonder raises $600M on a $7 billion valuation. Wonder plans to grow from 46 locations to 90+ by the end of 2025. Wonder creates food halls with circa 30 high-end restaurants, offering dine-in, takeout and delivery (Grubhub). The company generates over $2 billion in annual revenues. 

In Thailand, Yip In Tsoi, the operator of the food delivery platform Robinhood, with 2% market share, wants to ‘merge’ foodpanda into Robinhood, giving Delivery Hero share of future revenue. foodpanda, which has about 5% market share, is due to leave Thailand on May 23rd, and Yip In Tsoi is asking Delivery Hero to postpone that exit in order to allow transfer of the business in a way that retains customers and operations. 

Alibaba is launching Taobao Instant Commerce, a food, grocery and goods delivery business, to take on Meituan and JD, the leading delivery players in China. Ele.me, Alibaba’s food delivery arm, is handling orders from the new service. The service will begin in 50 major cities across China.

🇮🇳 Indian food delivery 🇮🇳

Rapido plans food delivery pilot in Bengaluru. Pilot to focus on short-distance deliveries (up to 5km) from densely located outlets. It also plans to work with a subscription-based plan model. 

Zomato shuts down ‘Quick’ - its 15-minute restaurant food rapid-delivery service - four months after launch. Zomato has been trying to make ultra-quick food deliveries work since 2022 - without success. ‘Quick’ did generate 8% of order volume, but apparently wasn’t worth it. Not to be confused with Blinkit, which focuses on grocery rapid-deliveries, but also operates Bistro, a food-rapid-delivery solution using in-house kitchens. 

Swiggy suspends ‘Geni’, its hyperlocal personal errand service, citing ‘operational constraints’. The service was available in ±70 cities across India, and was discontinued in all. Swiggy is doubling down on ‘Bolt’, its 15-minute food delivery product.

Glovo and Salad Africa, Nigerian fintech, partner to provide financing (loans) of up to ₦100M ($62k) to merchants who have been on the Glovo platform for 3+ months. Eligibility and credit decisions will be powered by sales data on the Glovo app. Careem makes it cheaper to order solo in Abu Dhabi. Data indicates that 64% of Careem’s food customers in the UAE typically order for one during lunch hours. Yango expands in Israel.

Foodpanda Thailand - an analysis worth reading on how Foodpanda went wrong from market leadership to 5% market share. 

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

Autonomous & remote-driving 🤖℡

Uber is continuing its massive push into autonomous vehicles. 

• Partners with May Mobility, US-based AV player, to launch robotaxis in the US. First city to be Arlington, Texas, by the end of 2025. 

• Partners with Momenta, a Chinese AV player, to introduce robotaxis in markets outside of the US and China. First deployment expected in Europe in 2026. 

• Expands partnership with WeRide, investing $100M in WeRide and planning to launch in 15 more cities over the next five years. The companies are working together in Abu Dhabi and soon will launch in Dubai. Expansion will be outside of the US and China. 

• Partners with Pony.ai, a Chinese AV player, to launch in the Middle East. Uber might have invested in the company. Pony.ai recently announced it has cut its software and hardware costs by 70%, 

Waymo is equally busy: 

• Partners with Toyota (+Woven) to “explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies”, i.e. make an autonomous car, for both Waymo (robotaxis) and consumers. This collaboration is still very early days. 

• Ramps up production in Arizona. Working with Magna, Waymo wants to add another 2,000 autonomous I-Pace to its fleet. 

Interesting data we have from Waymo - its fleet has circa 1,500 vehicles, and those we know are serving 250k rides per week. Simple average, that comes out to 166 rides/week/car, or close to 24 per day. Let’s use Lyft’s $19 avg. gross booking per ride (this figure represents the US market), so roughy $450 per car par day gross booking / revenue. The Driverless Digest also calculated numbers, landing at 24-30 rides a day. 

Aurora launches commercial self-driving truck service in Texas, making it the first company to have autonomous on-road commercial trucking service (I think, world wide). The route connects Dallas to Houston.  

WeRide launches fare-charging Level-4 autonomous robobus service in central Guangzhou. These “robobus” commercial services are new, but exist today also in Japan, South Korea, Norway and France; WeRide operates a similar service in Beijing. The service will run on a 13.6km loop.

Sensible 4 has found a buyer - Sumirai Technologies. Sensible 4 shut down in July 2023 and has since been looking for someone to buy the assets (code) it developed. Sumirai is an integrator of smart technology, especially for mining and industrial purposes.

Zoox issued a robotaxi software recall after a crash in Las Vegas. The accident was on April 8th, and the company paused all operations (remembering Cruise) until review and implementation of the software fix, resuming operations on April 17th. Also interesting to learn from the report that Zoox has over 270 vehicles deployed, which is a substantial number.  

Tier IV is developing autonomous trucking solutions, driven by a Japanese government initiated project, involving Isuzu and Mitsubishi Fuso. MotorAi, a German autonomy start-up, starts testing on public roads. May Mobility partners with Upstream Security, a cybersecurity company. 

Flying cars 🚁

AAM Reality index, April 2025. Ehang maintained 1st place with a score of 8.5, followed by Volocpoter (8.1) whose score went up after the Wafeng Diamond acquisition; and Beta Technologies (8), Joby (8) and Archer (7.9). 

Joby flies first crewed transition flights. Why this is an important milestone. 

Lilium collapse triggers battery supplier CustomCells insolvency.

In other news 📰

Bregal Milestone, a PE which also holds Ridango, an intelligent transportation software solution provider, acquires uTrack into Ridango. 

indiGOtech, a new OEM designing larger electric vehicles for ride-hailing and delivery, raises $54M. 

Someone. Developed. This. And it works. And I want one.

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

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Charlotte Albert is the new Account Director @ Mobilityways. 

Chris Pangilinan is the new Acting Senior Vice President, Department of Buses @ Metropolitan Transportation Authority. 

Joe Lampe is the new Lead Mobility Consultant @ FACTUAL. 

Juliana Carolina Kiraly Thomaz Rodrigues is the new Head of Sales Engineering @ Eve Air Mobility.

Lev Parkhomenko is the new Head of Quality & Business Operations @ inDrive. 

Steve Jukes is the new Group Manager @ Modaxo. 

Yongtae Jeon is the new General Manager - Demand Generation & Sales @ Kakao Mobility.

Congrats and good luck!

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