Lyft raises $1B led by Alphabet’s CapitalG

Uber's rival Lyft has raised $1 billion led by CapitalG, Google’s investment fund. The latest funding round values the ride-hailing company at $11 billion, the company announced. As part of the deal, CapitalG Partner David Lawee will be joining Lyft’s board.

The ride-hailing company said that the money will not only help its business, but the ride-sharing industry as a whole. “The fact remains that less than 0.5 percent of miles traveled in the US happen on rideshare networks,” the company says. “This creates a huge opportunity to best serve our cities’ economic, environmental, and social futures.”

Back in April, Lyft raised $600 million at a $7.5 billion valuation from a conglomeration of investors including Canada’s public employee pension fund.

Lyft announced the latest investment in an official blog post, and noted that it has run over 500 million rides to date, and expanded its coverage to 95 percent of the US population, up from just 54 percent at the start of 2017.

The latest capital infusion for Lyft comes when its arch rival, Uber is battling on multiple fronts both inside and outside the company. Another interesting angle to this story is the fact that the funding round was led by CapitalG, a unit of Alphabet formerly known as Google Capital. Notably, Google, through GV, was also an early investor in Uber, pumping $258 million in the still-nascent ride-hail service in 2013.

But the bonhomie between Uber and Google is now a thing of the past, thanks to Alphabet’s Waymo's lawsuit over allegedly stolen trade secrets regarding LiDAR tech.