Ride-hailing company Uber announced an agreement to acquire JUMP Bikes, "an electronic, dockless bike-sharing service," giving Uber access to its 12,000 GPS-enabled bikes in 40 cities across six countries.
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The company shared the news Monday after testing out the startup service in San Francisco for two months.
A source close to the situation told TechCrunch the sale was close to $200 million, but the exact price has not been disclosed.
As part of the acquisition, JUMP employees will join Uber’s team but the company will carry on as an independent subsidiary, JUMP CEO Ryan Rzepecki told TechCrunch.
"When we first began talking to Uber they were going through an extremely difficult time, with negative headlines each week and a massive change in leadership," Rzepecki wrote in a blog post Monday. "We expected to find a toxic work environment and a broken culture. Instead, everyone we met was smart, passionate, and genuinely wanted to help our team succeed. Through our collaboration we realized that we shared Uber's vision of multi-modal mobility and had the same goal of decreasing car ownership."
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Because the bikes are dockless with build-in U-bar locks, they can be secured to bike racks or furniture zones. According to the Verge, such zones include areas where you’d find benches or light/utility poles.
Using the Uber app, cyclists are able to make bike rentals similar to the way they book rides. The app would show available bikes nearby ready to be reserved. After using the bikes, users would leave them at designated public “bike zones” found inside the app.
"Our ultimate goal," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshah wrote in a blog post, "is one we share with cities around the world: making it easier to live without owning a personal car. Achieving that goal ultimately means improving urban life by reducing congestion, pollution and the need for parking spaces."
Details about the new cities or dates were not released Monday.
