Uber rival Sidecar hits dead end, will shut down ride and courier service on Dec. 31
The ride’s over for Sidecar, a pioneering ride-sharing service that simply couldn’t compete with Uber and Lyft’s mindshare—nor their massive venture capital-infused warchests, as co-founders Sunil Paul and Jahan Khanna made clear in their farewell post on Medium.
“We are the innovation leader in ridesharing despite a significant capital disadvantage, continually rolling out new products that set the bar for others to follow,” they wrote.
No more. Sidecar will stop all deliveries and rides at 2 p.m. on December 31. The closure doesn’t exactly come as a surprise; the company had already shifted focus towards Postmates-style delivery/courier services in 2015, after its attempt to differentiate from the competition by allowing customers to pick their drivers failed to give said competition any pause. And things were only getting worse; while Lyft’s raised over $1 billion and Uber’s near-constant funding rounds have totaled up to more than $10 billion, Sidecar raised a mere $35 million in its lifetime.
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