San Francisco Ride-Sharing Startup Uber Valued At $17 Billion
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS Interactive) -- After just 4 years in business, a San Francisco startup -- ride-sharing service Uber Technologies -- has received a $1.2 billion investment round for a valuation of $17 billion. That puts the company in an elite realm of Internet startups. The size of the sum also raises the question of what the company might be planning to do. After all, that's a lot of cash for a transportation business that depends on others to supply the labor and vehicles.
The new valuation, which represents close to a quadrupling of valuation in less than a year, according to The Wall Street Journal, would leave Facebook (FB) as the only tech company that had raised money at a higher valuation. The $1.2 billion additional investment puts Uber's total at slightly more than $1.5 billion.
The new round of funding, led by Fidelity Investments, may give Uber the largest total pot of private investment money after Facebook's pre-IPO $2.4 billion. It's larger than Twitter's (TWTR) $1.2 billion and Groupon's (GRPN) $1.1 billion. Among Uber's competition, Lyft comes in a distant second at $332.5 million.
CONTINUE READING: Uber's $1.2 Billion Payday at CBSNews.com
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