Uber Technologies, Inc., commonly referred to as Uber, is an American multinational transportation company that provides ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport.[1] It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities worldwide.[1] It is the largest ridesharing company worldwide with over 150 million monthly active users and 6 million active drivers and couriers. It facilitates an average of 28 million trips per day and has facilitated 47 billion trips since its inception in 2010.[2] In 2023, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of gross bookings) of 28.7% for mobility services and 18.3% for food delivery.[2]
Uber classifies its drivers as gig workers or independent contractors, a practice that has drawn criticism and legal challenges because it allows the company to withhold worker protections that it would have been required to provide to employees.[3][4] Studies have shown that, especially in cities where it competes with public transport, Uber contributes to traffic congestion, reduces public transport use, has no substantial impact on vehicle ownership, and increases automobile dependency.[5][6][7] Other controversies involving Uber include various unethical practices such as aggressive lobbying and ignoring and evading local regulations, many of which were revealed by a leak of documents showing controversial activity between 2013 and 2017 under the leadership of Travis Kalanick.
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.[8][9] 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.[9]
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.[10]
Following a beta launch in May 2010, Uber's services and mobile app launched publicly in San Francisco in 2011.[11][12] Originally, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi.[13] In 2011, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber after complaints from San Francisco taxicab operators.[14]
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.[8][15] 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.[16][17]