General Motors has made yet another play at creating its own set of transportation services, purchasing the technology and most of the employees of one of Uber's now-defunct rival Sidecar, in a deal valued at around $30 million, according to Bloomberg. Notably however, co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul will not be joining the company.
This deal is seen as a push to counter Uber's rapid surge in popularity and comes on the heels of a $500 million investment into another one of Uber's rivals, Lyft, in order to "leverage GM's deep knowledge of autonomous technology."
Uber has expanded rapidly over the last four years over the last four years becoming a veritable force in the industry. Just last month, it was valued at $62.5 billion, making it the most valuable, and wealthy, startup in the world, according to Bloomberg. As a testament to its growing status, Uber poached about 50 members of the robotics division from Carnegie Mellon university to work on its autonomous car project last January.
"They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy - basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalled a person who was there during the departures, according to The Verge. "These guys, they took everybody."
In the face of this, GM has been in the working to introduce its own set of transportation services, dubbed "Maven" - which was registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in November. Described as an "Application software for connecting vehicle drivers and passengers and for coordinating transportation services," it will allow owners of GM vehicles to give rides to commuters going in the same direction.
GM will have to work hard if it wants to topple Uber, as it has a market value of about $55 billion, less than Uber.
