Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 15,000 cities worldwide. It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 202 million monthly active users and 10 million active drivers and couriers. It coordinates an average of 42 million trips and delivery orders per day, and has coordinated 72 billion trips and delivery orders since its inception in 2010. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of gross bookings) of 29.9% for mobility services and 19.2% for food delivery. The company has launched or is in the process of launching robotaxi services in several cities worldwide in partnership with operators, software designers, and car manufacturers including Lucid Motors, Nuro, Baidu, Pony.ai, Avride, Nissan, Rivian, Zoox, Stellantis, Wayve, and Nvidia (to use the Nvidia Drive software).
History
In 2009, Garrett Camp, a co-founder of StumbleUpon, came up with the idea to create Uber to make it easier and cheaper to procure direct transportation. Camp and Travis Kalanick had spent $800 hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve, which they deemed excessive, and Camp was also inspired by his difficulty in finding a taxi on a snowy night in Paris. The prototype of the mobile app was built by Camp and his friends, Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with Kalanick as the "mega advisor" to the company. In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee; he was named chief executive officer (CEO) in May 2010. In December 2010, Kalanick succeeded Graves as CEO and Graves became the chief operating officer. Following a beta launch in May 2010, Uber's services and mobile app launched publicly in San Francisco in 2011. Originally, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi. In 2011, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber after complaints from San Francisco taxicab operators. Kalanick believed that in addition to efficiency, Uber offered elegance because all drivers had fancy black cars. He did not feel that regular cars driven by non-professional drivers would be attractive. Kalanick and his angel investor Jason Calacanis publicly stated in podcasts that the world's first rideshare company (Wingz) was illegal and would not work. The company's early hires included a nuclear physicist, a computational neuroscientist, and a machinery expert who worked on predicting arrival times for Uber's cars more accurately than Google APIs. In April 2012, Uber launched a service in Chicago, whereby users were able to request a regular taxi or an Uber driver via its mobile app. In July 2012, Uber introduced UberX, a cheaper option that allowed drivers to use non-luxury vehicles, but still subject to having commercial licenses. In April 2013, after Wingz, Lyft, and Sidecar obtained licenses to legally operate as rideshare companies, Uber announced that it was going to adopt this model and add regular drivers with personal vehicles to the UberX platform instead of only commercially-licensed vehicles, subject to a background check, insurance, registration, and vehicle standards. Former Uber executive Andrew Chen and Sidecar co-founder Sunil Paul credit the volunteer- and donation-based LGBTQ rideshare service Homobiles as their inspiration for enabling regular drivers to offer rideshares.. By December 2013, Uber operated in 65 cities. In December 2013, USA Today named Uber its tech company of the year. In August 2014, Uber launched a shared transport service in the San Francisco Bay Area and launched Uber Eats, a food delivery service.
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