Who's this other Uber?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #73 - Look at Them Grow!. Check out the full article for more insights.
If I'd ask you to name a company that can give you a ride, deliver food to your door, and rent you an electric scooter, what name will you give me?
Well, the one I'm going to be talking about checks all the boxes and isn't Uber.
Bolt, a European company that offers all of the above, raised $713M last week to compete with Uber. It's not exactly how they said it but that's really what it's all about.
Is Bolt actually worth it?
Let's have a look at growth using our App Intelligence, starting with rides, which is Bolt's core value.
Since 2017, Bolt saw downloads grow more than 44x. In numbers, it looks like just a few (12K per week) to more than half a million last week. The downloads come from pretty much all over. South Africa, Ghana, Ukraine, the UK, Poland, and Mexico are at the top, but the list is long.
The only two countries from this list where Uber wins in terms of downloads are Poland and Mexico.
In 2019 Bolt introduced its food delivery service. Much like Uber Eats, Bolt Food connects hungry folks and restaurants via delivery people. While the numbers aren't as massive as the ride app, Bolt Food is also experiencing great growth right now.
Downloads started slow, with the app averaging 5K downloads per week in 2019. Lockdowns in 2020 pushed demand for anything that will deliver food up, and the app enjoyed a stretch of x10 downloads. That didn't last very long, but after the big wave ended, growth continued at a healthy pace.
Bolt Food started 2021 with around 42K weekly downloads and has now reached more than 80K downloads, twice as many and with no reason to stop growing.
Should Uber be concerned? Probably. More than 60% of downloads for Uber Eats come from outside the U.S., and as we've seen in the U.S., food delivery is on the rise, and competitors aren't afraid to take a financial hit as they aim to get traction. This raise makes it easier for Bolt to do just that and get to more devices in Europe. After that, maybe even the U.S...
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
