Uber Is Looking For Another $1.5 Billion In Funding At A $50 Billion Valuation

Always. Be. Raising.

On-demand transportation an logistics company Uber could raise another $1.5 billion to $2 billion in funding, adding to an already massive war chest as the company expands into new markets and new verticals around the world.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the latest fundraising effort could value the company above $50 billion, which would put it in the same league as Facebook in its last private funding round before going public. The new valuation would also once again make it the most highly valued private company in the world by topping consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi, which was valued at $45 billion in its most recent round of funding.

Uber has already raised some $5 billion in debt and equity since being founded five years ago, but what’s another $1.5 billion between friends? The company has been growing rapidly, after all, and it continues to experiment with new services and features that could complement its people-moving business while running on the same massive logistics network it’s built around the world.

Case in point: UberEATS, a food delivery service which recently expanded from two markets to four; UberESSENTIALS, which promises to deliver everyday items to customers in Washington, D.C.; and UberRUSH, the company’s courier service currently operating in New York City. Uber is also preparing to launch a massive delivery service for merchants soon, based on some docs we received detailing how the service would work.

But the company could have even more capital-intensive plans in store, including the potential acquisition of Nokia’s HERE mapping service for up to $3 billion. It’s also investing in a robotics facility in Pittsburgh that could be used for the development of driverless cars.

An Uber spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog