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Almost a year after taking office, Dara Khosrowshahi continues to print his brand at the head of Uber. After buying a start-up specializing in e-bikes, the giant VTC now also on electric scooters, whose rise is spectacular in the United States. With Alphabet – the parent company of Google – Uber is one of the new investors in the Lime start-up, valued at $ 1.1 billion after a recent round.
Founded in 2017 by Toby Sun and Brad Bao – a former Chinese Tencent – Lime is experiencing a meteoric rise. The young push that wants to revolutionize urban mobility with its bicycles and scooters in free self-service ("free floating") is already present in 70 cities. The fresh money she has raised will enable her to buy new machines and continue her offensive in Europe.
Expansion
After Zurich, Frankfurt and Berlin, Lime deployed 200 electric scooters in Paris in June . The company wants to launch in twenty European cities by the end of the year. The sum invested by Uber in Lime is not known but it is "rather important" said the start-up.
Thanks to a partnership with rather vague contours for the moment, Uber goes integrate Lime scooters into its application. And to get closer to its goal: to become a platform of essential transport in cities.
Multimodal platform
The decisions taken by Dara Khosrowshahi these last months all go in this direction. After a successful trial in San Francisco, Uber acquired Jump Electric, an e-bike company, in the spring, for an estimated $ 250 million.
Uber has also partnered with Getaround, a company specialized in car rental and sharing, and Masabi, a start-up specializing in the purchase of electronic transport tickets.
More recently, the VTC company has joined forces with the Nice Transport Authority (Ligne Azur). ) to offer complementary transportation to its customers in the evening. The latter will pay a fixed price of 6 euros for their journeys. Transportation Authority and Uber will settle the difference to the driver.
Uber's moult is emulated. Its main competitor in the United States, Lyft, has just bought the self-service bike company Motivate, which operates in several major US cities. The two giants of the VTC have also applied to the City of San Francisco to deploy an electric scooter service.
Adrien Lelièvre
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