Meet all of Uber’s clones worldwide and see how they’re faring (Infographic)

Photo credit: Pixabay.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

Alright, so the galaxy was San Francisco, and a “long time ago” was 2009, when Star Wars only had six movies and Donald Trump was merely another really rich reality show personality. If you needed a ride back then, you got one from your friend, hoped public transportation was open, or took a pricey taxi. All of this was to change, however, when a startup called Uber began scraping out a place for itself. It would launch a instant transportation fleet of thousands.

It would find its place on our smartphones, our e-wallets, and even in pop culture. (I was surprised to find revivals of shows set in the early 90’s – The X-Files and Netflix’s Fuller House – mention the company.)

As venture capital and startup tracker Tracxn’s snazzy graphic shows this week, it may well be the unicorn that launched a thousand competitors at the rate it’s going.

These days, watching Uber’s quest for global expansion and competitors’ attempts at one-upping the American company is a bit of a reality show itself. Uber has many rivals – Tracxn has to slip in a disclaimer that it only included three clones per geography – but there’s still plenty of money to be made in the business. The graphic includes a dizzying representation of the investors involved in funding Uber and its clones.

Investing in a clone can mean actually investing in a handful of clones. Some on-demand transportation companies don’t bother with global expansion like Uber has – they prefer to team up with similar services to increase their international footprint. Didi Kuaidi, for example, is a feature of several mobile apps in China, from Alipay to Dianping, a daily deals portal.

Or, they can just team up with their fellow localized companies over the globe. That’s what happened between Uber’s biggest US competitor Lyft and Didi Kuaidi, Ola, and GrabTaxi. The dramatic alliance prompted our readers to dub the competition “Game of Taxis,” which might be a more appropriate metaphor that the Clone Wars – it’s harder to tell who the “good guys” are.

Forming partnerships to conquer new regions is a pretty great idea. After all, it’s bad enough putting up with the disgruntled taxi drivers in your home country – who wants to do that in several places at once?

See: China’s Didi now sees 10m daily rides. That’s way more than Uber’s global 2m

Using the power of the Force

Companies can also win love with much smaller perks. “Uber” may have become a verb in the way that “Xerox” became synonymous with “copy,” but my sister still prefers to work for Lyft. She thinks that Uber is too “corporate” and that Lyft is more “friendly.”

More than anything, though, she’s attracted by the promise of a mustache – and a glowing one, at that. Giving 100 rides gets her a nice light-up pink mustache to put on her dashboard, and she really, really wants that mustache. She’s 28 rides away.

The graphic shows that even the funding of all competitors combined doesn’t amount to war chests quite as big as Uber’s, but they’re getting there. Funding for both Uber and its clones didn’t really pick up (read: amount in the billions) until 2014, but between 2014 and 2015, there was around a US$5 billion jump in funding for both Uber and Uber’s clones.

The last segment of Tracxn’s infographic shows investments raised by individual companies.It fails to mention that some of these clones have teamed up. For example, TaxiforSure is on the list, but Ola acquired it in March 2015. And when you consider that Didi Kuaidi and Kuaidi Dache are now the same company and that they’re partners with numbers three, four, and six on the list, the gap to Uber’s funding goes down to about US$1.5 billion.