Lyft snapped up a shared ride startup, Hitch, to bolster its taxi services with cheaper rides to compete with Uber.
The popular ride-sharing service, Lyft, is making its next strategic move in challenging its rivals in the growing ridesharing industry. In an official company blog post Monday, Lyft said that it had acquired ride-sharing startup Hitch in a bid to bolster its Lyft Line service, the company's newly launched car-pooling service. The acquisition is suitable for Lyft as Hitch has expertise in simplifying ride-sharing by splitting fares.
Hitch is backed by a two-member team originally from Israel. It was launched in 2013. It started out as an aggregator for all three major ride-sharing services, including Lyft, Uber and SideCar to make it simpler for users to look for a ride without skipping apps. According to the Lyft blog, the acquisition will help the company expand its presence in more cities across the country. As a part of the deal, Hitch will no longer be operational as an independent app and the current Hitch drivers will be moved to the Lyft community.
"The Lyft team deeply shares our vision for collaborative transportation," Hitch co-founders Snir Kodesh and Noam Szpiro, wrote in the company's blog post. "They also value the impact and significance of community in making this dream a reality. Lyft is a perfect complement and together, we look forward to continuing to innovate in the transportation field. We're only at the cusp of this movement with ridesharing, and we can't wait to keep pushing the frontier."
The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Lyft Line is currently in its initial stages and is available for users in San Francisco. The company has plans to expand to Los Angeles soon. Ironically, Hitch also operates in San Francisco, which can help Lyft in building its portfolio before expanding to other cities, Business Insider reports.
The competition is intense for Lyft as its biggest rival Uber also offers a similar carpooling service called UberPool and Sidecar offers Shared Rides.
"The idea of shared rides is very simple, but in order to make it work really well at scale in an automated fashion, there's a lot of product details and engineering challenges that you have to get right," Chris Lambert, CTO at Lyft, told Mashable, hoping the new acquisition helps achieve that. "The goal is more markets and the goal is more adoption and the goal is more efficiency."
