November 12, 2026

Add to cart

Hi there,

Uber has been on an acquisition spree.

Last month, it agreed to buy ezCater, the catering platform that feeds office meetings, for $2.3B. That’s the latest in a run of nine acquisitions this year, up from five in 2025 and none in the two years before that.

So we looked at Uber’s acquisition strategy and who it should add to its cart next.

How Uber shops

Uber spent 2019 to 2022 buying delivery and ride companies like Careem, Postmates and Cornershop, then quieted down for two years.

This year, it’s agreed to nine acquisitions, and they fall into three groups:

Delivery apps abroad (4): Delivery Hero ($14.8B, pending), Korea’s Woowa Brothers (pending), Getir’s delivery business in Turkey (pending), and a majority of Careem in the Middle East
More things to book in the app (3): SpotHero for parking ($617M), ezCater for catering ($2.3B, pending), and Blacklane for chauffeurs (pending)
Getting around cities (2): European scooter company Voi (pending) and Hong Kong taxi app FlyTaxi

Seven of the nine are based outside the US, and ezCater and Blacklane both bring in business customers with bigger orders. Instead of buying its way into new categories like it did with Cornershop (grocery) and Drizly (alcohol), Uber is now buying the companies it used to compete with.

Nearly all nine are marketplaces that connect customers with drivers, restaurants or parking spots. But notably, what Uber doesn’t buy is the technology that could eventually replace those drivers. Since selling its self-driving unit in 2020, its only tech acquisition has been Segments.ai, a small startup that labels data for self-driving cars.

Where Uber should buy

Uber’s newest deals, ezCater and Blacklane, show it wants more business customers. If it keeps going after them, there are two obvious gaps:

Everyday meals for employees. ezCater handles catered meetings, but not the daily lunch budgets companies give their teams.
The rest of the trip. Blacklane gets business travelers to the airport. The trains, buses and ferries after that are still booked somewhere else.

Uber also builds on existing ties. A third of this year’s deals, Delivery Hero, Getir and Careem, were companies it already had a stake in or part of. That points to two areas where Uber relies on outside partners today:

A drone fleet of its own. Uber’s drone partner Flytrex also delivers for DoorDash, its biggest US rival. Owning it would keep those drones on Uber.
Sidewalk robots. Robots already deliver Uber Eats orders in several US cities, but Uber doesn’t own any of them.

4 companies Uber should buy

Sharebite, which runs meal benefits for companies. Employers use it to give workers a daily food budget they can spend at restaurants, filling the gap ezCater leaves.

Distribusion, which connects travel apps to trains, buses and ferries. Through one connection, retailers like Google, Alipay and Booking.com can sell tickets from travel carriers.

Flytrex, the drone delivery company. It was Uber’s first drone investment, but it also flies for DoorDash. The startup is scaling fast, targeting 60 delivery sites across the Dallas metro by mid-2027, on just $60M raised in total.

Coco, a sidewalk delivery robot company. Its robots already deliver Uber Eats orders in Chicago, Miami and LA. The startup last raised about 16 months ago and is in its Funding Window, per CB Insights.

One more thing: fertility tech is outhiring the rest of women’s health

Fertility and cycle tracking startups are growing their teams almost twice as fast as the rest of women’s health tech.

We teamed up with HLTH to build an Insights Hub that features the women’s health companies heading to this year’s show. Some standouts:

Oura: grew 47% and launched Menopause Insights, with in-app access to clinicians.
SimpliFed: grew 89%, the most of any maternity company, and raised a $10.8M Series A to expand into virtual OB.
Midi: grew 57% to nearly 800 employees and hired its first VP of Health Plan Sales.
Pomelo Care: grew 29% and is hiring menopause providers in at least 10 states.

Building a women’s health company? Share your market perspective here for a chance to be featured on CB Insights.

Heading to HLTH next week? Visit us at booth #853 for a demo of the Insights Hub and help planning who to meet. Save $250 on registration with code H26PAR_CBI250. Register here.

We love you.

The CB Insights Team

P.S. Want to find the companies everyone else misses? Join our live sourcing session, where we’ll build a real shortlist from scratch, including stealth startups no one is talking about yet. Register here.

GET STARTED WITH CB INSIGHTS

Start your free trial

CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter.
Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here