NOTE: Bloomberg Second Measure launched a new and exclusive transaction dataset in July 2022. Our data continues to be broadly representative of U.S. consumers. As a result of this panel change, however, we recommend using only the latest posts in assessing metrics, and do not support referring to historical blog posts to infer period-over-period comparisons.
With today’s announcement that Lyft has reached an annualized gross revenue run rate of $1B, TechCrunch draws the inevitable comparison to Uber:
Lyft’s most recent valuation: $2.5 billion
Uber’s valuation when it was valued at similar financial metrics: $3.5 billion
You will note that those are not the same numbers.
Here you can speculate. Was Uber growing more quickly at the time than Lyft is now?
Let’s use a combination of Second Measure data and reported revenue[1][2][3] to examine each company’s growth from $100M to $1B gross ARR.
Aligning by the $100M milestone[4]:
It took Lyft 23 months to increase gross ARR from $100M to $1B, growing 10% compounded monthly.
Meanwhile, Uber took just 16 months to reach the $1B mark, growing 14% compounded monthly.
In the same amount of time it took Lyft to reach $1B, Uber grew to nearly $2B.
It’s commendable that Lyft has reached this mark, but there’s no question: Uber’s milestone-to-milestone growth has far outpaced Lyft’s.