Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber attends the 55th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2025.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Uber reported first-quarter results Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations for earnings, but fell shy of anticipated revenue growth for the quarter. Shares fell about 5% following the report.
Here’s how Uber did versus analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 83 cents vs. 50 cents expected.
Revenue: $11.53 billion vs. $11.62 billion expected.
Revenue at the ride-sharing company grew about 14% in the first three months of 2025, up from $10.13 billion during the same period in 2024.
The company also reported net income of around $1.78 billion or 83 cents per share during the first three months of 2025, up from a net loss of $654 million, or a loss of 32-cent loss per share, during the first quarter of 2024.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah said they expect gross bookings to reach between $45.75 billion and $47.25 billion during the current quarter, with EBITDA in the range of $2.02 billion to $2.12 billion for that period.
In April, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber and accused the company of “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” around its subscription service called Uber One.
“It’s a bit of a head-scratcher for us,” Khosrowshahi told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
He said 60% of the company’s gross bookings in its Uber Eats business come from Uber One members, and that the subscription service is growing quickly.
“The suit alleges that some people don’t realize that they’re signing up or cancellations are difficult, but I’d encourage you to go experience it yourself,” Khosrowshahi said. “It’s very, very simple. You take a couple of steps to be able to cancel if you want.”
Uber’s largest business segments, which include its ride-hailing business and food and grocery delivery service, saw bookings increase year-over-year.
Here are the key segment numbers:
Mobility (gross bookings): $21.18 billion, up 13% year over year
Delivery (gross bookings): $20.38 billion, up 15% year over year
The company also said its “monthly active platform consumers,” had grown to 170 million, up 14% from the first quarter of last year. Users booked around 3.04 billion “trips” during the first quarter of 2025, up 18% from the first quarter of 2024.
Khosrowshahi also said the company views autonomous vehicles, or AV technology, as “the single greatest opportunity ahead for Uber.”
Uber allows app users to book robotaxi rides in some U.S. markets, or order food for delivery via autonomous vehicle in others.
Khosrowshahi said Uber reached an “annual run-rate” of 1.5 million autonomous vehicle trips.
In March, the company began to offer users in Austin, Texas the option to hail a robotaxi from its partner, Alphabet-owned Waymo exclusively via the Uber platform.
Khosrowshahi said the Waymo Austin launch “exceeded” Uber’s expectations and around 100 Waymo vehicles operating in Austin are now “busier than over 99% of all drivers” in Austin as far as completed trips per day.
Besides its Waymo partnership, Uber has also agreed to work with Volkswagen, Avride, May Mobility, and the autonomous trucking company Aurora for autonomous ride-hailing and freight services in the U.S. Uber has additional partnerships with AV companies internationally including with WeRide, Pony.AI and Momenta.
“Supported by the consistent strength of our core business, we continue to build towards the future, including five new autonomous vehicle announcements in just the last week,” Khosrowshahi said in a release.
Executives are scheduled to discuss Uber’s first-quarter results and plans during an earnings call Wednesday at 8:00 a.m. EDT.
Brad Gerstner, Altimeter Founder and CEO, speaks at the Delivering Alpha conference in New York City on Sept. 28, 2023.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Investor Brad Gerstner cautioned Monday that OpenAI‘s deals with Nvidia and AMD are purely announcements, not deployments.
“Now we will see what gets delivered,” the Altimeter Capital founder told CNBC. “Ultimately, the best chips will win.”
OpenAI’s megadeal with AMD and its relentless push to expand artificial intelligence capabilities underscores the intensifying competitive landscape.
Gerstner said the deals provide “more evidence that the world will remain compute-constrained despite best efforts to bring massive supply online.”
Read more CNBC tech news
Experts say it’s also another validation of the AI arms race heating up, with AI a key element in the geopolitical race between the U.S. and China.
OpenAI’s Chinese rival DeepSeek sent shockwaves last year when it claimed to have a lower-cost AI model than its U.S. peer. And Deepseek has continued to innovate, delivering new open-sourced models using domestically made AI chips.
Last week, the U.S. government issued a report warning of DeepSeek’s national security concerns, Axios reported.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation said DeepSeek provides Chinese Communist Party views more frequently than U.S. models, according to Axios.
OpenAI’s partnership with AMD is raising hopes that it is taking the right steps to increase production and build more complex AI models.
“What we’re really seeing is a world where there’s going to be absolute compute scarcity, because there’s going to be so much demand for AI services, and not just from OpenAI, really from the whole ecosystem,” OpenAI President told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday. “And so that’s why it’s just so important for this whole industry to come together.”
The AppLovin logo arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AppLovin shares plummeted on Monday after Bloomberg reported that the SEC has been probing the mobile advertising company over its data-collection practices.
The agency has been looking into whether the company violated agreements on pushing targeted ads to consumers, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said that the SEC is responding to a whistleblower complained filed this year along with multiple short-seller reports, and added that neither the company nor its officials have been accused of wrongdoing.
An AppLovin spokesperson said the company doesn’t typically comment on the “existence or non-existence” of regulatory matters.
“That said, as a global public company, we regularly engage with regulators and if we get inquiries we address them in the ordinary course,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Material developments, if any, would be disclosed through the appropriate public channels.”
The stock dropped 14% in regular trading after the report, which landed shortly before market close. It fell another 5% in extended trading.
AppLovin’s stock has been on a tear, jumping about 80% this year after soaring more than 700% in 2024. The surge has been driven by the company’s artificial intelligence technology that’s allowed it to provide better ad targeting capabilities to brands.
Last month, AppLovin was added to the S&P 500, replacing MarketAxess Holdings, at the same time that Robinhood joined the index in place of Caesars Entertainment.
AppLovin made the move into the benchmark despite a short-seller’s effort to keep it out.
In March, Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500.
Three notable short-seller firms, including Fuzzy Panda, have slammed AppLovin of late. The latest was Muddy Waters Research, which in March said the company’s ad tactics “systematically” violate app stores’ terms of service by “impermissibly extracting proprietary IDs from Meta, Snap, TikTok, Reddit, Google, and others.” In so doing, AppLovin is funneling targeted ads to users without their consent, Muddy Waters said.
Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research put out reports the prior month, taking aim at AppLovin’s AXON software, which drove its earnings growth and stock surge. The shares dropped 12% on Feb. 26, the day of the short reports.
After those reports were published, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi wrote a blog post, defending his company’s technology and practices, and taking aim at the short sellers trying to profit from AppLovin’s decline.
Figma signage appears at the New York Stock Exchange in New York as the company prepares for its shares to begin trading on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Figma shares jumped 7% on Monday after the design software vendor’s technology was promoted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an onstage demo at his company’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco.
Altman discussed Figma’s integration into ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million monthly users. He showed how third-party applications could plug in with OpenAI’s Apps SDK, or software development framework.
“When someone’s using ChatGPT, you’ll be able to find an app by asking for it by name,” Altman said. “For example, you could sketch out a product flow for ChatGPT and then say, Figma, turn this sketch into a workable diagram. The Figma app will take over respond and complete the action.”
In addition to asking for Figma’s help by name in ChatGPT, the assistant can also suggest Figma when it’s relevant, Figma product manager Luke Zhang said in a blog post.
The rally for Figma, at its high point, was the steepest since the day of the company’s public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange in July.
Figma has been ramping up its own tools for working on app and website designs using generative AI models from OpenAI and other providers.
Subscribers to products that connect to the Apps SDK will be able to log in without leaving their ChatGPT conversations, Altman said. He said people working on products in Figma can also launch the FigJam tool to keep working on development ideas. Apps SDK is based on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that OpenAI rival Anthropic introduced last year.
Software developers will be able to submit apps for review later in 2025, Altman said.
Over time, OpenAI will offer many ways to generate revenue through third-party integrations, Altman said. Last week, OpenAI announced a feature allowing people to buy products listed on Etsy through ChatGPT.