Lyft has picked up a startup that should accelerate its carpooling efforts.
Lyft announced late Monday that it has acquired Hitch, a small San Francisco startup, to help with the development and expansion of Lyft Line, its recently launched carpool service. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
Hitch's two-person team developed an iOS app that promised to save money on Uber and Lyft rides by simplifying the process of splitting rides with strangers traveling on the same route. It also provided features that help you learn more about the strangers in your car.
"Hitch was one of the early pioneers of the shared ride idea in San Francisco," Chris Lambert, CTO at Lyft, told Mashable. "They really had the same long-term vision that we did. They've built a product and technology and approach to shared rides that we think will work well in other markets."
Snir Kodesh and Noam Szpiro, the two cofounders of Hitch, will join Lyft to work on Lyft Line and other efforts. Hitch will shut down, effective immediately.
The Hitch acquisition comes as Lyft, Uber and a similar service called Sidecar race to roll out carpooling options in various markets. Lyft and Uber announced fare-splitting options within hours of each other last month, in an effort to attract more customers with the promise of lowering the cost of rides.
Lyft Line is now an option in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
"The idea of shared rides is very simple, but in order to make it work really well at scale in an automated fashion, there's a lot of product details and engineering challenges that you have to get right," Lambert says. That's what he hopes Hitch will help with: "The goal is more markets and the goal is more adoption and the goal is more efficiency."