Business News: Lyft, Now Worth $5.5 Billion, Hops Into The Autonomous Car Race With General Motors

Lyft announced the close of its $1 billion Series F round today – half a billion of which came in from General Motors. The ridesharing service is now worth a whopping $5.5 billion and plans to use the money to work with GM on a connected network for self-driving cars.
The other $500 million came from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed’s Kingdom Holding Company, Janus Capital Management, and previous investors Didi, Rakuten, and Alibaba.
The funding from GM helps form a long-term strategic alliance to build out a connected, ownerless car service with Lyft. GM has been working on autonomous vehicle technology and will now start testing autonomous Chevy Volts on several of its campuses in 2016 – though GM did not want to give a date for when these vehicles might be available to consumers.
This is a very interesting development, considering Lyft CEO Logan Greene has said in the past that most people wouldn’t buy self-driving cars. Seems he believes Lyft and GM will be the future providers for these vehicles and we will all be summoning them on our smartphones instead.
So what’s in the Lyft deal for GM? The vehicle manufacturer wants in on the rideshare business and Lyft is offering GM a ridesharing platform for GM’s self-driving vehicles.
“We’ve seen the growth in the ridesharing space and in particular, Lyft is growing faster than anybody else,” GM president Dan Amman explained about the investment to TechCrunch. Lyft says it is growing 3x’s faster than any other ridesharing service with a 14x year-over-year growth rate in New York City and a completion of 7 million rides each month (or 84 million a year). Keep in mind Uber, 2.5 years older than Lyft, just completed its billionth ride.
“With GM and Lyft working together, we believe we can successfully implement this vision more rapidly,” Amman said.
GM also has OnStar, a built-in communication network. The vehicle manufacturer sees an opportunity to use its OnStar network as a tool on the ridesharing platform. Lyft plans to use part of the new funding to create what it aptly calls an “Autonomous On-Demand Network” to use for picking up passengers with GM’s self-driving vehicles.