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F500-2021-281-Uber Technologies

Although best known for its ridesharing services, the technology company also offers food delivery, package delivery, and freight transportation in over 900 metropolitan areas worldwide. Uber dropped 53 spots in the Fortune 500 this year, as its revenue slid 21% in 2020 despite huge, pandemic-driven growth in its Uber Eats food delivery service. The company reported a $6.8 billion loss for 2020, but its stock delivered a 72% return for the year as investors bought into Uber's long-term growth potential.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-228-Uber

The ride-hailing, food-delivery, and mobility company founded in 2009 makes its <em>Fortune</em> 500 debut in 2020, despite losing $8.5 billion in 2019. The company's technology is available in 69 countries.

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Uber is a global tech company specializing in mobility and delivery services. Best known for its consumer ride-hailing platform, Uber also offers food delivery through Uber Eats, freight logistics with Uber Freight, and electric bike and scooter rentals in select markets. By using real-time technology, Uber makes transportation more accessible, efficient, and convenient for riders and drivers alike. Uber’s app continues to be a transport mainstay in cities around the world.

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Uber Technologies (UBER): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

Uber Technologies

uber technologies

Welcome to the Uber Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alex Hwang, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Uber's Q1 2026 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and CFO, Balaji Krishnamurthy. During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the press release, supplemental slides and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law.

For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risks and uncertainties described in our most recent form 10-K and in other filings made with the SEC. We published our quarterly earnings press release, prepared remarks and supplemental slides to our investor relations website earlier today, and we ask you to review those documents if you haven't already. We open up to the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara.

Thanks, Alex. Uber had an exceptional start to 2026, driven by strong execution and a continued focus on product innovation. Despite a complex backdrop marked by war and weather, we delivered top line and profitability at or above the high end of our guidance. Gross bookings were up 21% year on year, reflecting the durability of our platform, and that growth was once again trip and audience-led, with our audience growing 17% alongside strong engagement. Our performance this quarter was balanced and broad-based. Mobility gross bookings accelerated to 20% with record margins. Delivery grew 23%, led by grocery and retail and supported by strong retention. Freight returned to growth for the first time in nearly two years. Importantly, we're scaling this growth profitably.

Non-GAAP EPS increased 44% year-over-year, more than twice as fast as our bookings growth, driven by disciplined cost management and operating leverage. We also generated strong free cash flow and returned a record $3 billion to shareholders through buybacks this quarter. We're also continuing to invest in the strength of our platform, which is compounding over time. We've now surpassed 50 million Uber One members and 10 million drivers and couriers globally, both important milestones that reflect strong customer loyalty and expanding number of earner opportunities on our platform. On the product front, Go-Get, our Go-Get event last week showcased how we're expanding Uber's role in everyday life across travel and local commerce.

From hotel bookings and Travel Mode to new ways to shop and coordinate across our platform, these innovations are designed to deepen the everyday utility of our services and to build engagement and loyalty. We're also making strong progress across our strategic priorities, including autonomous, where we continue to believe a hybrid network will unlock significant long-term value. We now have more than 30 autonomous partners across mobility and delivery and are scaling deployments globally. AV mobility trips grew more than 10x year-on-year, and we remain on track to be live in up to 15 cities by the end of the year, including new deployments in the U.S. With the launch of Uber Autonomous Solutions, we're building the technical and operational infrastructure to help our partners commercialize faster. Looking ahead, our guidance reflects continued momentum, disciplined capital allocation and a clear focus on durable, profitable growth.

With that, operator, if we could open it up for questions.

Thank you. Your first question comes from Doug Anmuth with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Dara, can you just talk about how the early benefits of insurance cost savings are playing out in L.A. and San Francisco, and what gives you the confidence in continued further U.S. mobility acceleration in 2026? Also just following up on Go-Get last week, how do you shift Uber users to more of an on-demand from more of an on-demand mentality into booking hotels ahead of time, ahead of when it's needed? Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely, Doug. I'll start with Go-Get and then Balaji can jump in on insurance. You know, we've always had an internal debate whether or not we can make the transition from on-demand kind of behaviors to more kind of preparing ahead, reserving ahead kind of behaviors. It really started with the build of Uber Reserve. We have thought about Uber Reserve as a product that we would build mostly for airport travel. We had some kind of feedback from a user as well. The reliability of Uber is awesome, but if I absolutely knew that the driver was gonna show up 15 minutes early, etc., it could reduce some of the stress as it related to travel. Of course, it was a great opportunity for us to continue to increase travel bookings.

We've consistently seen our Uber Reserve service growth rates continue to grow well in excess of the mainline business, and as you know, the mainline business is growing at healthy rates as well. The margins on Uber Reserve are higher. Customer satisfaction is very, very strong, and now we're developing the Reserve service, not just as a service for people to go to airports, but people to get picked up when they land in airports as well. The experience with Reserve for us demonstrated our ability to go from on-demand to planned services, so to speak. Travel is a very, very natural category for us to get into. Airports are about 15% of our mobility gross bookings, and 40% of, for example, our U.S. riders take trips outside of their home city.

Globally, just last year, we had over 1.5 billion trips happening outside of one of our users' home cities. When you put that together, which is proving ourselves with Reserve, you know, moving from on-demand to kind of planning ahead, and then the incredible audience and efficacy we have with a travel consumer, hotels was, of course, a very, very natural expansion for us. We're very happy to have a relationship with Expedia. Their inventory is second to none, so now we've got 700,000 hotels available on Uber as we speak. We've taken most of the economics of that deal, and we are giving it back to our Uber One members. Uber One members get 10% Uber credits. There's a rolling list of 10,000 hotels where you get another 20% off as well.

Really the focus for us is drive that cross-platform activity, give a bunch of money back to Uber One members, obviously you've seen kind of the momentum that we've had with Uber One, with over 50 million members growing 50%. The retention rates are higher. They spend three times more. It's a unique advantage that we have over our competition. We're very much looking forward to the product. We're really happy that the team put it together and happy about our partnership. We're hoping hotels can be just as big as Reserve. Balaji, you want to talk insurance?

Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question, Doug. I'll level set first on where we are with our insurance journey. As we said at the end of last year, we expect to see hundreds of millions of dollars of savings in our insurance line this year, thanks to the great work our policy teams have done as well as the tech improvements we have implemented in the market. In addition to that, we also had our auto insurance renewals that went into effect in March, and we've seen continued improvement in rates there, which is also, you know, with the improvement in the market conditions here, for auto insurance, we have found opportunities to also offload more risk to third-party carriers. You know, with that favorable market environment, we've taken advantage of that opportunity.

All in all, it's putting us in a place where this will be the first year since COVID where we expect to see good leverage on our insurance cost line for the U.S. mobility business. As we've said before, our philosophy has been to return that goodness back to the market, and consumers see improvement in the pricing environment for Uber rides on the system. As a result of that, we are seeing really good elasticity and as we would have expected, we've seen that price reduction translate to acceleration in trip growth. You know, the overall California market growth has accelerated.

If you look at L.A., which is the market with the most significant insurance headwinds over the last few years, the trip growth trends there are significantly better than California and the rest of the country. You know, we expect to see this translating to accelerating U.S. business growth in 2026, as we've previously said, and we feel even more confident today than we did in December or January.

Your next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe building on Doug's question, I wanted to go a little bit deeper in what you see as some of the critical technology investments you're making on the consumer-facing side to tie all of these services together, and layer in elements of personalization and recommendation so increasingly consumers know how to find these services on your platforms. How much over time do you think some of that behavior will be more agentic driven? How does that, again, line up with what you're making on the investment side? Thanks so much.

Absolutely, Eric. In terms of our tech investment and general investment, the one thing that I would highlight is it remains of utmost importance for us to get the basics right. That means reliability as it relates to mobility, increasing selection of the kinds of rides that you can get, and same thing, reliability and selection and delivery. Those are kind of the core precepts. We think we provide the best reliability, best selection, both mobility and delivery globally. Once you do that, and by the way, we seek to improve that every single year, you can add on services on top of that.

We think AI and agents provide a unique benefit in that, you know, one of the challenges that we've had in the past in terms of offering all of these experiences on our app is that you have to build out UIs that essentially the user interfaces that are standard for all of your users. The fact is that different users like to interact with our services in different ways. If you have to kind of build a fixed UI for the majority or the optimized average of your users on a global basis, there are some users who may not see what you've got to offer, or may prefer to interact with you in a different way. AI solves all that because essentially the way that any user wants to interact with your services is up to that user.

They can talk, and they can ask for whatever they want. "Hey, you know, search for hotels for me. Get me an Uber to the airport. Get me an Uber from the airport to the hotel," et cetera. The UI is whatever the user wants that UI to be. That creates unique opportunities for us to build out new services on our platform, and we think also affords us the ability to drive cross-platform usage, which, as you know, is a very important strategic initiative of ours and a unique way in which we differentiate versus others. The growth of cross-platform consumers is growing one and a half times faster than the overall growth of consumers. We're locking in consumers with our Uber One membership, where they spend three times more than others.

We're using AI, one, to make sure that consumers can interact the way that they want to. For example, Cart Assistant, you can just take a picture of, you know, something that you see on a table or in a store or on a menu, and we'll create a shopping cart for you. Our earners can ask our AI agents questions about earnings, where they should go, when they should work, et cetera, and you can get the exact personalized answers for you. We're using larger models to essentially upsell and offer products for you in a very, very personalized way. That can work in very simple ways, like three-quarters of the time when you get a ride on an Uber, we have preselected the destination for you. In other words, we anticipate where you're gonna go.

We offer it up as a card, and three-quarters of the rides on Uber, you know, we have successfully actually predicted with AI algorithms where we think you're likely to go. After work, you're probably gonna go home, for example. At the same time, come up with upsells that delight and surprise you, like a hot cup of coffee waiting for you in that Uber Reserve when you're going to the airport. AI makes this all possible. We're very early in the early innings, and we're extremely excited about the potential that it has for cross-platform usage on our platform.

I'll just augment what Dara said. As you think about the cross-platform opportunity for us, we are also investing in new entry points on both our rides and Eats app. At Go-Get, we talked about One Search as another feature that we're introducing that is basically universal search across the product. Just to paint a picture of the size of the prize here, we are already seeing nearly $15 billion of run rate gross bookings for our delivery business coming from our mobility app, and 30% of our eligible mobility consumers have never even used Uber Eats yet. There's a lot of headroom here.

Next question comes from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanna ask one about U.S. suburban delivery. You know, you've made a lot of progress on the suburban mobility side. Where are you on sort of the overall suburban delivery business and sort of using the mobility growth to drive better delivery growth as well? That's one. Two, the strength of the Uber One, bless you. The strength of Uber One was pretty strong it seems like quarter-over-quarter. Can you just walk us through some of the drivers of growth of Uber One at this point in the quarter?

Sure. Absolutely. We're very happy with our development in terms of U.S. suburban delivery. But I tell you, Brian, it's very, very early innings. I would actually expand this, not just the U.S. suburban delivery, but just growth in sparse markets in the U.S., outside of the U.S., pretty much in every single country that we operate in. We're going out and acquiring selection.

Generally, as we add selection to these markets, whether it's more drivers in your suburbs or outside of the big cities, or it's more merchant selection in the U.S. suburbs or many other suburbs across the world, we're seeing that trip growth rates are growing 2x faster generally in mobility and delivery in these sparse markets versus the core urban markets where kind of we grew up as a company. This is a global playbook that we got. It's about expanding selection. It's about investing in reliability. Then it is also about tailoring our products. For example, we see a higher percentage of Reserve and Wait & Save. Grocery is very strong in suburbs as well.

It's, you know, we think we're very early in terms of the selection and reliability improvements that we see in those markets. Lots to go. It's working in the U.S., it's certainly working pretty much everywhere outside of the U.S. as well. In certain markets, like in Australia, the size of those sparse markets are about two times the size of the average sparse markets in other countries around the world. We think there's a huge amount of potential here. You know, in terms of Uber One and the growth here, it's continuing. I wouldn't say that it's any 1 item that's driving the growth of Uber One. It's 50 million members. It accounts for over 50% of our bookings now, and growing 50% year-over-year.

You know, we ended 2024 with 30 million members, so we've added 20 million members in just a single year, which is pretty extraordinary. The number one is the membership benefits themselves. The membership costs kind of similar amount as competitive membership programs, we offer you no delivery fees, and we offer you credits on mobility as well. Just the benefits of our membership program are structurally better than the benefits, we believe, of any other membership program out there, local membership program. Then we are introducing benefits. We talked about hotels, getting 10% back hotels. You know, on a long weekend in New York City, that's getting $100 back, which pays for your entire Uber One membership for the year.

We're also increasing benefits like membership benefits are now gonna work globally. We have a lot of global travel, travelers, and you get benefits for your global travel. We introduced new features like no fees above a $60 basket for grocery as well. We're also going to run Member Days again, which has been a big feature for our members, delivering lots and lots of savings for the members. We've seen this growth go on for a long time. We've kinda wondered when it's going to slow down. At this point, we don't see it slowing down, thanks to the innovation of the team that I'm very, very proud of.

Next question comes from Justin Post with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. We'll go to AVs. I know Waymo is launching a bunch of southern cities. Just wondering what you're seeing in those cities, any changes to your growth rate. Then second, some real progress with partners during the quarter. What's kinda putting you over the top with, like, Zoox and others getting those deals done? Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Justin. We continue to believe AVs are huge opportunities for the entire industry. This is, you know, we think another trillion-dollar TAM. We don't see this as being a winner-take-all market. We certainly see Waymo moving very quickly as we are moving very quickly. I'll remind you, we expect to be in 15 markets by year-end and then significantly more than that going into next year with, you know, partners like Nuro, like NVIDIA, like Zoox as well. We're very, very happy about what's going on there. You know, our mobility business accelerated versus last quarter. Our U.S. mobility business actually accelerated more than the overall business, we talked about the anticipation that U.S. mobility is going to continue to accelerate for the balance of the year.

At this point, we don't see any effect of the Waymo launches on our overall business, and we continue to see Waymo, the performance of our businesses with Waymo in Austin and Atlanta continue to be strong. Driver earnings are up. More drivers are joining those platforms as well. If you look at kind of markets where Waymo has been launching, has been around for some period of time, San Francisco and L.A., for example, our category position both in San Francisco and L.A. is higher today than it was six months ago. This is an overall business that is of scale, the overall mobility business. We continue to see very, very healthy trends, and we don't see any signs of that abating at this point.

Of course, we continue to invest in AV aggressively with our partnership model. I think, listen, why are we having success in signing up partners? I think it's self-evident, which is we've got demand. We have shown that the utilization of these cars, which are very, very expensive on our platform, is higher. We're also very excited to talk about Uber with the launch of Uber Autonomous Solutions, which helps our AV partners focus on kind of building the driver, and we can build everything else around them, whether that's fleet management, helping them with data collect, et cetera. We think we're very early innings here, and we're very excited about the AV trends that we're seeing.

Next question comes from Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is open.

Hi there. Thanks for taking the question. I had a couple, please. Balaji, maybe for you first. Appreciate the ROI framing in the letter. You've clearly been investing behind the business and making some near-term margin trade-offs. What does the successful payback look like for Uber at the aggregate level? Is it this ability to compound at 20% for much longer? How do you think about that? Maybe for Dara, you know, the Santander deal announcement yesterday was interesting around financing. It looks like there's line of sight to financing AV fleets in the future as well. What has that broader conversation been like with those partners, and how do you think about integrating those partners into scaling these fleets over time? Thank you.

All right. I can take the first one. Thanks for the question. I think the starting position you should think about is this is a global, very broad business, and there isn't a single formula that would help us decide on ROI and payback period for the investments we are making. We have to be cognizant of that, and we kind of take each product initiative on its own merits. Generally what we are looking for is either the products that we're investing behind should be able to drive incremental audience acquisition or frequency lifts and/or it needs to be able to drive margins for the company. I, I think a good way to think about this instructively is to look at the barbell strategy that we've been executing.

On our barbell for mobility, the low-cost products that we've been investing behind, they drive 75% higher frequency than our core products. On the other end of the spectrum, our high, higher fare premium products drive 3.5 times higher profit growth for the company. All of these products are driving 25% lift in first-time acquisition for us as well, right? Effectively, as you pair those kind of fact patterns together, what you're driving towards is the highest lifetime value we can get for our investments we're making. The payback period will vary. There are certain products where you get the payback instantly, and there are others where it may take a few quarters.

As we think about this portfolio, we're able to balance it in a way where we can drive healthy growth on the top line, and we can show you healthy annual margin expansion for the company as well. We're pretty happy with the momentum that we're delivering right now.

Yeah. As far as the Santander deal, it's something that we're very, very excited about. I think to step back for a second, in order for AV to scale, and get into, you know, the hundreds of millions in terms of trip count, we really have to build out a whole ecosystem around the development of these AV drivers. That ecosystem includes fleet management, it includes depots and charging and repair and cleaning. It includes financing, it includes insurance as well. We're investing in that entire ecosystem. You know, we talked about a new relationship that we're building with Hertz on the fleet management side. We have teams going out and securing depots in markets that we think are reg-ready from a regulatory standpoint as well now.

We have been doing so to some extent and working with these fleets for some period of time as an increasing percentage of our drivers have moved from combustion vehicles to EVs as well. These are muscles that we've built for some period of time. Financing and building out kind of financing for AVs is, to some extent, trickier because the residual value of these AVs is not something that is clear, right? There's a residual value for cars and used cars. There are very liquid markets for them. That is not true of AVs at this point, although it will be true.

For us, the advantage that we have is that AVs on our network have a very predictable use in terms of revenues or trips per vehicle per day, which are at a premium to kind of 1P type networks, and as a result, revenue per vehicle per day. That kinda creates the circumstances where we think you can build a very, very healthy financing ecosystem. We can build AV, but we can also build it capital light, essentially. We're really happy to work with Santander, as it's been incredibly innovative in this field on a global basis. Then, you know, on insurance, for example, we talked about a relationship with Marsh and Apollo as well to build out insurance, and we think actually AV insurance is gonna be cheaper than human insurance because AVs ultimately will be safer as well.

We're investing in the whole ecosystem, very happy with the Santander relationship, and we're looking forward to building from there.

Next question comes from John Colantuoni with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Starting with AI spending, where you already bumped up on your original full year budget not long after the Q1 ended. When thinking about how you're approaching layering AI capabilities into workflows, are you viewing them as more supplementing or replacing existing processes to give just to give a sense for how much those investments are incremental to the existing spend? Second, maybe you could just talk a little bit about any notable market share trends across your top 10 delivery and mobility markets. Maybe talk a little bit about what's helping you deliver leverage across delivery specifically, while growth is simultaneously benefiting from faster growth in some lower margin offerings like grocery and retail. Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing the use of AI just grow at unbelievable rates, and you're seeing it in the market rates, in the market as well. We're certainly seeing it within our company. You know, I think if you look at Uber, we have been using AI tools, whether it's for pricing or matching or routing for years and years. We're kind of very comfortable in the real world, which is a probabilistic world versus a deterministic world. Using these AI tools and building with these AI tools, it's just kind of how we build and how we built for many, many years. We're seeing uptake of these tools, whether it's our legal team or marketing team or developers. We think it's creating kind of employees with superpowers.

I would say that it's important to note that, you know, AI, for example, our engineers don't just write code. There's a lot more that goes into it. You know, there's prototyping ideas and design ideas with designers and PM. There's certainly coding activity, which AI helps with is reviewing and testing your code, whether it's an AI agent reviewing that code, and then humans as well to make sure that there's a proper code review before you check in that code, whether it's being on call and making sure that all the systems are running, or it's maintenance, it's migrating code or improving kind of performance of that code. AI is helping our engineers and our employees across the company become more efficient to move faster across the board in almost every single step of building.

We are seeing it. Like, if we look at the number of code commits for engineer, it's increasing. The number of lines per code is increasing. About 10% of our codes now is committed. That's committed is built by agents, autonomous agents out there. Obviously, we check the code before it gets committed. I think you should just look at AI as an accelerator. For us, for every company, it means that our investment in AI tools and infrastructure is increasing. That will be offset by slower headcount growth. If every person at this company can increase their throughput by 20%, 30%, 50%, 100%, I think leading headcount growth and leaning in on AI investment is gonna be well worth it.

Balaji, do you want to talk about the competitive environment?

Yeah. I'll get there. Just one last comment on AI. I would say candidly, when we set our budgets for 2026 in November, we underestimated the amount of impact the AI tools could have. Obviously in December, we had new models come in. We've re-upped our investment here, and as Dara said, we are trading that off against incremental headcount growth, which we noted in the remarks as well. On delivery competition, first of all, as we noted in the earnings materials, we are seeing our delivery position improving quite substantially across the globe.

We are as we think about our top 10 markets, really in the U.S., we are continuing to invest in our sparse markets expansion and we expect to see results from that over time. In international markets, we are very much on an offensive footing. If you think about Europe, where we are seeing an incremental level of competitive intensity from both DoorDash and Prosus as they have expanded into the market, we've held our own quite well. In addition to defending our core positions, we are on the offensive in the market. We've announced expansion to seven new markets. Just this morning, we launched in Finland. We are already at the number one position on the App Store there.

In, you know, we've talked about the other large markets in the region that we will continue to go into. In APAC, we are seeing very good trends in Australia, Japan, Taiwan. Australia's been a standout from its highly penetrated position. As we've gone into sparser markets, we've re-accelerated that business back to 30% growth. Similarly in Japan, we're seeing very good trends as well.

Next question comes from Ron Josey with Citi. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe one on AV and another one on just trips growth. On AV, Dara, getting back to your comment on just how everything needs to come together, charging, insurance, financing, et cetera. As we reach services in 15 cities by the end of this year, just would love to hear your thoughts on perhaps what are the bottlenecks or are there bottlenecks as we scale supply and demand really grows across these cities and more, as more services launch? Then on trip growth in San Fran and L.A., I think we've talked about it improving meaningfully. Talk to us a little bit more about the drivers here.

I know we mentioned greater affordability insurance, but just wondering if you're seeing perhaps greater adoption of Uber One and cross-platform usage in those cities specifically and using that as a guide for others. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. In terms of getting to market and scaling in market, you know, obviously we continue to expand the number of partners that we have, and our partnerships are very, very broad, from Zoox, to a Nuro, Lucid, to Pony and WeRide and Baidu as well in the international markets. We think they'll continue to broaden. Right now I'd say the blockers are we just need more cars on the road. We have to make sure that these drivers are safe. Usually we introduce them with a safety driver, and then we'll take the safety driver out when our partners kind of pass our safety case as well, such as, you know, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as well.

At the same time, we have to make sure that we are introducing these autonomous vehicles into local markets with the appropriate dialogues with those local markets, making sure that we have dialogue with regulators, which will take time. Regulators are kinda They're asking the right questions, which is, you know, how are AVs going to interact with in situations where the power goes out or interacting in school zones or working with, you know, firefighters, et cetera, in the city? Just the interaction between AVs and real life is something that is critical. Questions about safety, about congestion, about the effect on work and drivers as well.

These are all important questions and dialogues that we have to have. Both in the AI space, in the digital AI space and the physical AI space as it relates to AVs as well. We wanna be a part of that dialogue. You'll see us kind of expanding on our thinking there, but this is going to take time, both in terms of scaling the business, fleet management, financing, insurance, and also making sure that we have the right dialogue with regulators on a local basis and all the constituents that are gonna be affected by these changes in our society. It'll take time, but we think it's worth investment. Balaji, you wanna talk about trips?

Sure. On SF and L.A., we already talked about this even in the Q4 earnings release that we were seeing the impact of incremental AV adoption in the market as being expansionary for ridesharing in the cities, in aggregate. As Dara mentioned, our category position in these markets has also expanded over the last six months, which has had a accelerating impact on the sort of trajectory we're seeing there. Looking ahead, all of the comments I made earlier about insurance-driven goodness as well will show up in the trip trajectory that you should see in these markets. Not only are we seeing these healthy trends in the market today, we expect that the acceleration should continue as we go through the rest of the year.

Sarah, we'll take our last question, please.

Thank you. Your last question comes from Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning. Thank you for the question. I wanted to talk about an inbound question we're getting from investors a lot, and that's a greater risk to marketplace's direct relationship with their users as we could see an adoption of personal agents going forward. The view is someone's gonna talk to their personal agent that either Meta or Google builds, and they say, "Order me a rideshare ride with the fastest ETA," or, "Order me pizza from my favorite place," and they never interact with their go-to apps, and you get, like, abstracted away. Could you talk about Uber's approach to this, how you're viewing the risk, if there's, like, some preventative measures in your terms of service or any ways to push back around those fears? Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing that I would say is we are building an indispensable what we view as an indispensable local service, and the breadth that we have in terms of operating in over 70 countries, and many of them both mobility and delivery, is really unparalleled. We continue to make investments in engagement of our users and our earners as well with the 50 million Uber One members that we talked about growing 50% year-on-year, so that the engagement that they have is a real direct and deep engagement that they have with us. First thing I'd say is we are investing in these agents, and we are investing in these AI tools, and we're seeing kind of the interaction directly with our agents be the first use case.

That's a magical use case, and I talked about this earlier in the call. Like, three-quarters of the time, for example, the mobility, we're guessing we can anticipate where you're going to go, so it's just kind of a one-push button. You know, our agent knows, "Hey, Balaji, time to go home, right, for you." Those are kind of unique benefits that we bring. At the same time, we are working and talking to many of these third-party agents. We have a great market position, so we're able to kind of often dictate the terms of trade in those discussions. I think you'll know that I came from the travel industry many, many years ago, and there were fears, for example, in travel in terms of metasearch and this layer above the travel companies.

As the travel business consolidated with an Expedia or Booking and Airbnb, which are incredible companies, most of the value of those front ends accrued to the large players, the consolidated players, the Expedias, the Airbnbs and the Booking.com. We've kinda seen this movie before. As long as we are building terrific core products, we think we will get more than our fair share of consumers coming direct to our services. We will build in APIs to, whether it's an Apple or an OpenAI or a Claude, or, you know, a Gemini, we will work with these agents as well. I think we'll continue to see that the majority of our transactions come direct. We saw the same theme play out in metasearch.

I don't know if folks remember, but at one point, even Google Maps had kind of comparison shopping between Uber and Lyft, and it wasn't the same experience as coming direct to the app. We're very confident that, you know, AI is going to empower entirely new experiences, but we think the majority of those experiences are gonna come direct to us. All right, I think that's it. Thank you very much for joining the call. Huge thank you to the Uber teams who delivered another terrific quarter for us. Another thank you to our partners, whether it's our earners, couriers, drivers, and also merchants, who make this all possible. Thank you very much for joining, look forward to talking to you in the next couple of quarters.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

Uber Technologies (UBER) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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