Well.. Uber sold their self-driving division to Aurora (Sequoia Capital and Amazon). They've kinda committed themselves to being solely a gig-economy app with no plans or ambition.
Not exactly; they want the benefits that they think self-driving will bring, without doing the work.
> Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora. Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.
> Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.
Uber is basically shifting from a heavy NIH "build, don't buy" culture to a less insulated culture. This is manifesting at all levels, from more widespread adoption of AWS/GCP internally to seeking partnership deals (in SDV w/ Aurora, but also in other areas e.g. SKTelecom, etc)
and it didn't make sense to me then either! They'd have to build out massive fleets of cars and technicians... at the moment they're really just managing contractors and do simple background checks and car inspections... much less overhead than maintaining a fleet.
> Aurora is not paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment last year from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (As a refresher, Uber held an 86.2% stake (on a fully diluted basis) in Uber ATG, according to filings with the SEC. Uber ATG’s investors held a combined stake of 13.8% in the company.) Shareholders in Uber ATG will now become minority shareholders of Aurora. Notably, once the deal closes, Uber together with existing ATG investors and the ATG employees who continue their employment with Aurora are expected to collectively hold about 40% interest in Aurora on a fully diluted basis.
> Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will take a board seat in the newly expanded Aurora.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/07/uber-sells-self-driving-un...