It's 2023 and years have passed since the monster fundraising peak for on-demand transportation and delivery startups locked in highly competitive races against one another to dominate urban consumer mobility.
But since many of the biggest and most tenacious players are still in the market, those rounds haven't entirely disappeared. Cabify, a Madrid-based platform that competes with Uber in Spain and Latin America, has announced that it has secured $110 million in funding, which it plans to use in part to expand on its existing footprint, expand its technology stack, and add more electric vehicles to its his fleet.
The company currently has more than 42 million registered users and 1,2 million drivers in eight markets which include Spanish cities such as Madrid and Barcelona, as well as cities in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. His plan is to triple income in the next three years and expand to another 25 urban centers with more than 200.000 inhabitants..
Financing is a mix of equity and debtsays the company. Own funds come from Shore Asset Management (the family office of Francisco Riberas, one of the main shareholders of Gestamp, the Spanish automotive giant), the financial services giant AXIS (through his Fond-ICO Next Tech) and other entities that have not been disclosed.
But we have no idea of the exact amount of the new financing: the $110 million also includes a €40 million loan from the European Investment Bank actually announced in December 2022, and also includes proceeds from a round of financing of an unconfirmed amount that Cabify secured in July 2022.
pitchbook notes that the investment in July 2022 valued the company at $1.490 billion, so that is the latest amount declared. However, to contextualize that figure a bit -and an example of the pressure that startups are under right now with a higher "cost of capital" than before-, when Cabify raised 160 million dollars back in 2018 (a prime time for those kinds of outsized funding rounds), had a valuation of $1.400 billion.
The company has a fairly large capitalization table below that figure: PitchBook lists no less than 33 current investors (plus another 13 investors who have already sold their shares). The list of active investors includes Rakuten (the Japanese "Amazon" that has used Spain as the headquarters for its European efforts), Endeavor Capital and the Winkelvoss twins.
Cabify's fundraising underscores the fact that while regulators may not hold as many of these transport companies to account as before, and consumers may not talk about them as much as they did before COVID, they continue to grow and Specifically, they are raising money in a tight capital market to continue investing in their growth.. Cabify does not reveal revenue figures, nor if it is really profitable in any market or in general, but it says that it is growing.
In 2021, the company followed the example of Uber and other market operators and began to offer 'multimodal' services, ie subscriptions to various forms of transport. It also incorporated grocery delivery into its application.
The result has been an increase in revenue: Cabify points out that "billing in 2022 is already 24% higher than that of 2019, and 32% higher than that of 2021.” Cabify told me that the global turnover for 2021 was 518 million dollars, which would mean that the estimated figure for 2022 is 683,8 million dollars (it also means that 2021 had not yet returned to 2019 levels).
"This commitment from strategic investors is recognition of the positive impact of Cabify and its potential to continue creating long-term value for our investors and for the cities in which we operate," said Juan de Antonio, CEO of Cabify, in a statement. "These are partners who share our vision of the sustainable mobility sector and will allow us to accelerate the execution of our strategic plan."
The electric vehicle strategy will be developed in several phases, as a continuation of the objective that the company set for all trips to be zero emissions by 2025 in Spain, and by 2030 worldwide. The EIB loan, earmarked for this purpose, will be used to deploy 1.400 electric vehicles and charging stations in Spain.
The latest on this front is a tender that the company will hold this year to acquire vehicles and charging infrastructure. (Cabify works with drivers who have their own vehicles, but has also created its own fleet, Vecttor, which operates in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Seville and Malaga, and has a 95% "eco or zero" label.)
It has also signed an agreement with Fenie Energy, an independent marketer of electricity, gas and energy efficiency solutions, "to promote the installation and start-up of charging points throughout Spain to accelerate the electrification of the vehicles of taxi drivers and self-employed drivers who use Cabify". That will include discounts for drivers to install charging points.
