Uber Stealthily Files For An IPO, To Double India Tech Headcount

Global ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc. has filed the paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) according to a Reuters report on Saturday. The news comes just days its US rival, Lyft Inc. also filed for an IPO.

The simultaneous IPOs reflects the intense competition between the two cab-hailing companies which have been in an extended two horse race to dominate the US market.

Uber, which currently has a market valuaton of $76 Bn (INR 5.42 Lakh Cr), has been one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial companies. Last year the company’s cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick resigned from his position following a tumultuous six months of scandal. Since then the company has appointed a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and is looking to regain investor confidence.

According to the report, Uber faces a deadline to go public by September 30, 2019, and a filing this week suggests the debut will come earlier than that.

Uber India To Double Tech Hires

Unrelated to the reports of its IPO, Uber’s India unit said it will expand its engineering team in India and is looking to double its product and engineering headcount across tech centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Plans are afoot to scale up to over 1,000 techies across engineering and product teams in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, said the company which currently has 500 plus engineers across the two locations.

“In 2018, our tech teams grew by 150% and we are focused on doubling down again in 2019,” Apurva Dalal, Head of Engineering, Uber India, said in a statement.

The company said that it will continue to hire talent from campus placements in the country along with lateral hiring in the areas of data science, distributed systems, mobile, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

According to CNBC report which claims to have seen an internal mail by Uber India head Pradeep Parameswaran, to Khosrowshahi, Uber CFO Nelson Chai, and other executives, India also accounts for 11% of the total trips received by the platform from across the globe. Uber’s food delivery service UberEats has also grown seven times over the past four months.

India is Uber’s only major market in Asia after it sold its businesses in China, Russia, and eight other countries across Southeast Asia in the last two years.