优步创纪录的170亿美元融资轮押注低价出行将成为默认出行方式

做的是什么生意

Uber runs a smartphone car-hailing service where riders tap to summon a car, payment happens through the app, and drivers are paid by direct deposit; by 2014 it paired a premium black-car service with the cheaper UberX and operated across US cities and abroad.

启动资金：June 2014 Series D: $1.2B at a $17B valuation, a record for a venture-backed company; the leaked 2013 dashboard implied roughly $213M in annualized revenue on a ~20% commission.

起因

By late 2013 Uber's model was demonstrably working: leaked internal-dashboard screenshots, confirmed by TechCrunch and not denied by CEO Travis Kalanick, showed over $1B in annualized gross bookings, roughly $213M in annualized revenue at a ~20% commission, about one million ride requests a week and almost 80,000 new signups a week, while a recent filing valued Uber at $3.5B. Commenters on the 2014 funding thread said Uber already did more trips in San Francisco than taxis and was winning whole markets, and the company had been dropping fares and commissions to expand both supply and demand.

经过

The June 2014 raise became a bidding war: the Bloomberg report linked in the thread said venture and private-equity investors bailed after the valuation soared beyond $10B. Uber closed $1.2B at a $17B valuation on 2014-06-06 - a record for a venture-backed startup - and Kalanick said the company would keep experimenting aggressively with lower prices to boost demand and raise the number of trips each driver completes per hour. The capital funded expansion into new countries and verticals such as same-day delivery while Uber fought regulators on several fronts: Virginia ordered Uber and Lyft to stop operating, London cab drivers were staging protests, European authorities were rebuking the service, and Uber was publicly hiring legal and policy staff to change the rules.

可借鉴之处

创纪录估值是为赌注提供资金，而非了结赌局：投资者定价优步自身扩展出租车市场，考验在于降价与监管胜利能否赶在法律挑战之前。