With 200 Million Monthly Users, Uber Readies for Autonomous Rides

The mobility landscape, as its name implies, is constantly moving.

And as Uber executives stressed to investors on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday (Feb. 4), the mobility landscape is increasingly starting to move on its own.

On the heels of autonomous driving company Waymo’s $16 billion fundraise announced Monday (Feb. 2), which gave the Alphabet-owned startup a $126 billion post-money valuation, Uber devoted unusual attention in its earnings materials to autonomous vehicles. Executives, for their part, did not promise imminent transformation but constrained expectations. The company’s argument was that autonomy will arrive unevenly, scale slowly and reward platforms capable of balancing fixed and flexible supply.

Uber sees itself as one of those platforms, with executives suggesting that Uber’s early deployments in Austin and Atlanta show that adding autonomous vehicles to Uber’s network increases total demand rather than cannibalizing human-driven trips. At the same time, Uber cautioned against extrapolating from San Francisco, where regulatory conditions and demographics are atypical.

“We enter 2026 with a rapidly growing topline, significant cash flow, and a clear path to becoming the largest facilitator of AV [autonomous vehicle] trips in the world,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said.

“Uber accelerated into another record-breaking quarter, with more than 200 million monthly users completing more than 40 million trips every day — our largest and most engaged consumer base ever,” Khosrowshahi added.

The company also disclosed a leadership change in its finance team, with Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah stepping down as chief financial officer and Balaji Krishnamurthy set to succeed him.

“After five years of 20%+ growth, we are entering 2026 with strong momentum, while remaining solidly on track to deliver on our three-year growth and profit outlook,” incoming CFO Krishnamurthy said. “With large and growing free cash flows, over the coming years we will invest with discipline across a multitude of opportunities, including positioning Uber to win in an AV future.”

Still, the company’s share price had dropped mid-single-digits at time of reporting on its lower-than-expected earnings per share for the quarter and a softer 2026 guidance.

Read more: Uber and Lyft Prep Driverless Taxis After Abandoning Effort

Scale Is No Longer the Question for Uber’s Growth

Uber reported for the most recent quarter that revenue rose 20% year over year to $14.4 billion, slightly ahead of market expectations, while gross bookings climbed 22% to $54.1 billion, the company’s fastest pace in nearly three years. Trips reached 3.8 billion for the quarter, and monthly active users surpassed 200 million for the first time. These figures place Uber among a small group of global platforms still capable of expanding at scale without obvious signs of demand fatigue.

Growth is being driven less by price and more by participation. User growth accelerated in the fourth quarter, with the company adding more new customers than in any quarter since the post-pandemic rebound. Those customers are also behaving differently. Newer cohorts are using Uber more frequently than earlier ones, a signal that the platform’s utility is broadening rather than peaking.

Mobility, long the symbolic core of Uber’s business, has reasserted itself as its primary profit engine. Gross bookings in the segment rose 19% year over year in the fourth quarter, with growth accelerating in the U.S. and remaining strong across Europe and Latin America. More important than the top line, however, is the margin trajectory.

Delivery has completed a parallel transformation. Once dismissed as a pandemic-era convenience business with questionable long-term margins, it now operates at a $100 billion annual bookings run rate. Fourth-quarter delivery bookings rose 26% year over year, with growth spread across restaurant delivery, grocery and retail.

See also: Uber Acquires Segments.ai to Grow Data Labeling Business

Platform Economics Come Into Focus

Uber’s most consequential progress may lie outside its headline segments. Uber One, the company’s membership program, grew 55% year over year to more than 46 million members. In the U.S., members now account for more than a third of mobility bookings, reinforcing the program’s role as a demand stabilizer rather than a discount vehicle.

Advertising, meanwhile, has become one of Uber’s highest-quality businesses. Sponsored listings and new formats such as in-app journey placements convert real-world intent into marketing inventory with minimal incremental cost. For a platform that intermediates transportation, food and retail decisions in real time, the strategic value of this capability is difficult to overstate.

Still, Uber’s fourth-quarter results do not suggest that its risks have disappeared. Regulatory pressure, competitive intensity and technological uncertainty remain structural features of the business. But they do indicate that Uber has entered a phase where those risks may increasingly be managed from a position of financial strength rather than strategic necessity.