Lyft

Lyft is a San Francisco ride-hailing company that matches riders with drivers through its app and also runs bike-share systems, including Citi Bike through its 2018 purchase of Motivate. Logan Green and John Zimmer launched Lyft in summer 2012 as a service of Zimride, the college carpooling company they founded in 2007. Zimride was renamed Lyft in May 2013 and sold the original carpool service to Enterprise Holdings that July. In July 2025 Lyft bought Freenow for 175 million euros, extending the business into Europe.

Founders Fund led a $15 million round that closed in October 2012. In May 2013 Andreessen Horowitz led a $60 million round, and VentureBeat reported that Lyft had raised $75 million in the prior 12 months from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mayfield and Floodgate. In January 2016 General Motors invested $500 million as half of a $1 billion round valuing Lyft at $5.5 billion, with Kingdom Holding Company, Janus Capital Management, Rakuten, Didi Kuaidi and Alibaba. Lyft's S-1 records the Series F at $731.5 million, a Series G of $600 million in 2017, a Series H of $1.7 billion from October 2017 to April 2018, and a Series I of $588.6 million in 2018, when the company was valued at $15 billion.

Lyft priced 32.5 million shares at $72 on March 28, 2019, raising $2.34 billion at a $24.3 billion valuation, and began trading on Nasdaq as LYFT. Revenue was $2.16 billion in 2018 against a net loss of $911 million. Before the offering, Rakuten held 13.05 percent of Class A stock, General Motors 7.76 percent, Fidelity 7.71 percent, Andreessen Horowitz 6.25 percent and Alphabet entities, through CapitalG, 5.33 percent. Lyft posted its first GAAP profit in the second quarter of 2024, and David Risher has been CEO since March 2023.

Lyft shows a consumer marketplace whose seed and early-stage backers, Founders Fund, Floodgate, Mayfield and Andreessen Horowitz, entered when it was a carpooling startup, while most of its capital came later from strategic and crossover investors. Preferred stock sold from 2016 through 2018 alone totaled about $3.7 billion. Liquidity came seven years after the Lyft launch and twelve years after Zimride's founding. Those late private rounds were priced well below the $24.3 billion IPO valuation, so investors in the 2016 to 2018 rounds also had a markup at listing.