Uber acquires electric-assist bike-share company Jump
Uber is making a big push into bicycles.
The ride-hailing company announced Monday it was acquiring bicycle-share company, Jump. The San Francisco-based company known for its red frames with a battery-powered boost had partnered with Uber for the past few months in San Francisco. Uber Bike is sticking around.
Now Jump and its fleet of e-bikes (in January the company launched 250 of the bikes into San Francisco with rides for $2 for 30 minutes) is officially part of Uber, pedaling Uber away from solely cars and driving to get around. This is a big step in Uber's transformation into a multi-modal platform.
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Jump CEO Ryan Rzepecki said in a post about the deal that Jump had been talking to Uber for a while before the pilot program and eventual acquisition happened. "We expected to find a toxic work environment and a broken culture," he said about the partnership. But under the new leadership of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, whom Rzepecki says leads with humility, "we realized that we shared Uber’s vision of multi-modal mobility and had the same goal of decreasing car ownership."
Details of the deal were not disclosed. Last week TechCrunch reported the sale was priced at $100 million or higher. App analytics firm Apptopia found an estimated 25,000 Jump app downloads and about 6,000 daily active users. With the sale, those users will likely need to switch over to the Uber app to access their dockless e-bikes.
In Khosrowshahi's announcement from Uber about the acquisition, he hinted at similar news to come -- maybe an e-scooter acquisition?
Topics Uber
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
