With yesterday’s announcement of a strategic investment in Verne, the robotaxi company founded by Mate Rimac, Uber has returned to investing in autonomous driving, but this time under significantly different rules. Instead of developing technology in-house, as it has done for years with losses exceeding $1.8 billion, Uber is now investing in external partners and positioning its platform as the digital infrastructure on which robotaxis will operate.
Given that the partnership with Verne also includes the Chinese company Pony.ai, as can be gleaned from the announcement, Pony.ai will provide the autonomous driving solution, Verne will own the fleet and operate the service, while Uber will provide access to its global user network through its platform.
Testing is already underway in Zagreb, and commercial operations are expected to commence in the coming months, making Zagreb the first European city with a commercial robotaxi service available through the Uber app.
However, to understand what this investment means in a broader context, it is essential to look back at Uber’s previous ambitious investments and acquisitions.
Expensive Lessons
Uber’s obsession with autonomous driving began in 2015 with a strategic partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, from which it recruited dozens of roboticists.
The following year, in August 2016, Uber acquired Otto, a startup for autonomous trucks founded by Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of Google’s autonomous vehicle program, better known as Waymo, for about $680 million. However, the acquisition quickly turned into a legal debacle, as Waymo sued Uber for stealing trade secrets, claiming that Levandowski had taken nearly ten gigabytes of confidential documents before leaving Google. Uber settled the case in 2018, and Levandowski was ultimately criminally convicted.
Despite this scandal, Uber continued to invest in the internal development of autonomous vehicles through its unit Advanced Technologies Group. However, costs were enormous. In 2019 alone, Uber spent $530 million on ATG. Finally, in December 2020, Uber sold ATG to the startup Aurora Innovation in a transaction that valued Aurora at ten billion dollars.
Aurora did not pay cash for ATG; instead, Uber transferred its stake in ATG, additionally invested $400 million in Aurora, and received a 26% stake in the new company along with a board seat for Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. With this transaction, Uber divested a unit that had cost it nearly two billion dollars in total and clearly signaled that the future lies in partnerships, not in internal development.
Creating a System
This shift is evident in a series of moves Uber has made since 2024. In August 2024, Uber strategically invested in the British startup Wayve, which develops AI systems for autonomous driving and tests its technology in Uber vehicles in London.
In early 2026, a partnership followed with the Canadian Waabi, in which Uber invested $250 million as part of a $1 billion funding round, planning to integrate as many as 25,000 Waabi robotaxis into its platform. Raquel Urtasun, the founder of Waabi, previously led Uber’s autonomous driving research lab.
In October 2025, Uber also acquired the Belgian Segments.ai, a specialized company for labeling data from lidars and other sensors, a key technology for training autonomous driving systems.
Thus, the partnership with Verne and Pony.ai is a logical next step in that strategy. Unlike previous attempts, Uber is not developing hardware or software here; instead, it is building a system in which various partners bring their technology while Uber provides the global distribution network and user base.
About Twenty Acquisitions
Autonomous driving, of course, is just one part of the story. Uber’s largest acquisition ever remains the purchase of Middle Eastern rival Careem in 2019 for $3.1 billion, eliminating Uber’s strongest competitor in the region from Morocco to Pakistan. However, it partially relinquished that position in 2023 when it sold its $400 million stake in Careem’s super-app platform.
In the midst of the pandemic, in 2020, Uber acquired the American food delivery platform Postmates for $2.65 billion, strengthening its Uber Eats at a time when passenger transport had drastically declined. The robotic unit Postmates X was also inherited from Postmates, which Uber separated into an independent company, Serve Robotics, for delivery in 2021.
That same year, a series of other moves followed. For example, Uber Freight acquired the American logistics company Transplace for $2.25 billion, the American alcohol delivery platform Drizly was purchased for $1.1 billion (which Uber completely shut down three years later), and the full acquisition of the Chilean grocery delivery platform Cornershop was completed for about $1.4 billion.
Earlier, in 2018, Uber also acquired the network of shared electric bikes Jump Bikes, which it handed over to Lime in 2020 in exchange for a stake in that company.
From 2016 to the present, Uber has conducted a total of about twenty acquisitions worth several tens of billions of dollars. The most active year was 2025, with four completed acquisitions, and the investment in Verne shows that the pace is not slowing down in 2026.
