Uber

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 is also in the process of developing robotaxi services in partnership with Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Baidu.

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.