Lyft vs. Uber: Surpassing $1B ARR

—

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.

  1. Oct 2013: Uber reached $1B gross ARR (source) ↩︎

  2. Nov 2013: Lyft reached $100M gross ARR: (source) ↩︎

  3. Oct 2015: Lyft reaches $1B gross ARR (source) ↩︎

  4. Each compounded monthly growth rate (CMGR) calculated from month 0 to month N ↩︎