People in Silicon Valley have been talking about a possible tie-up between Alphabet and Lyft where Alphabet is thinking of investing $1 billion into the ride-sharing tech company. Lyft already has a partnership with Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet working on autonomous cars.
The deal might be confirmed fast because as Softbank is trying to invest more cash into Uber whilst trying to negotiate for more equity if that deal goes sour, Softbank might just turn their eyes towards Lyft. That should further complicate matters between Alphabet and Lyft according to a report by Axios.
If the deal goes through, the $1 billion would help Lyft challenge the current incumbent which is Uber in the US as well as further their investments into autonomous ride-sharing with other companies. In terms of strategies, Tim Lee of Ars Technica thinks that Lyft’s strategy is akin to Google’s strategy when it comes to being the “Android” of the self-driving car business.
What does that mean? According to Tim, he compares it with Uber and Tesla. In both, their model and approach towards self-driving cars may be quite similar to how Apple is dominating in the tech world. They want to control both the hardware and the software like how Apple does with iOS and the iPhone.
Thanks to Uber now getting through a lot of internal hurdles as well as external lawsuits, Lyft is gradually increasing their market share by expanding into more areas in the US as well as announcing more partnerships, one recently with Drive.ai, a tech company focusing on autonomous cars.
Lyft also recently launched a new television advertisement starring Jeff Bridges in order to spur more awareness of the brand and the service, reminding folks out there that they are around and an alternative to Uber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbqOldR0kN0
So far, all investment talks have been done in private and neither company has officially given any statement regarding it.
[Source: Bloomberg & TechCrunch]
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