Uber Technologies, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

You may begin. Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you for joining us today and welcome to Uber's second quarter 2026 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and CFO, Balaji Krishnamurthy. During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the press release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law.

For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risks and uncertainties described in our most recent Form 10-K and in other filings made with the SEC. We published our quarterly earnings press release, prepared remarks, and supplemental slides to our investor relations website earlier today. We ask you to review those documents if you haven't already. We will open the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara.

Thanks, Alex. Q2 was another outstanding quarter for Uber, with record audience and engagement, driving durable growth, expanding margins, and record cash generation. Gross bookings were 22% year-over-year to more than $58 billion, above the high end of our guidance and marking our fourth consecutive quarter above 20% growth. Just as importantly, that growth translated into significant operating leverage with non-GAAP EPS growing 35% year-over-year and trailing 12-month free cash flow exceeding $10 billion for the first time in our history. Those results give us the ability to continue investing from a position of strength across our priorities. Our recently announced agreement to acquire Delivery Hero is a great example.

The combination is going to expand our reach to nearly 100 markets and extend the proven strategy that has underpinned our growth for years by roughly doubling the number of markets where we can offer the full power of our platform across mobility and delivery. By bringing our technology and Uber One to millions more people, we believe this deal will create significant long-term shareholder value. We also continue to invest behind one of the largest opportunities in Uber's history, autonomous vehicles. Over the past year, the conversation around AVs has shifted from whether the technology can deliver a compelling service to how broadly, reliably, and economically it can scale. That distinction matters because we believe the industry structure is becoming clearer. It mirrors what's happening in AI broadly. A few years ago, many expected AI to converge around a single foundation model.

Instead, multiple frontier models have emerged alongside a growing open source ecosystem. We believe AVs, which are essentially physical AI, will follow a similar path. Just in the last week, we've seen NVIDIA release its Alpha Mayo open weight model, and our partners at Wayve received a permit in the U.K., and Zoox received approval to scale its robotaxi. The momentum across our partner base is remarkable. Unlike foundation models, however, AVs are physical, regulated systems that have to be deployed market by market with the variable patterns of ride hailing. That makes the commercialization layer critical, and that's exactly the opportunity we're building towards. Our ambition is straightforward, to become the world's leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles. Taken together, we're executing with discipline today while building the capabilities we believe will define Uber's next decade of growth. With that, operator, let's open it up for questions.

Yeah, absolutely, Brian. In terms of what the milestones we're looking at, the most important milestones are really launches, and the number of cities that we are live in, both with vehicle operators and then without vehicle operators. To remind you, we're live in seven cities, and we're on track to be live in 15 cities by year-end. We've got a Nuro Lucid launch coming in the Bay. We've got Zoox coming in Vegas. We've got Wayve in London and Tokyo. Baidu also in London, and then Pony and Vern in Zagreb, and potentially more. There's a bunch of launches coming up in the balance of the year. Really, we're looking for more in 2027. We'll continue to launch markets with the partners that I talked about, but we'll be adding additional partners into the ecosystem as well.

We expect to see Rivian in the market. This is kind of a full stack kind of a build Which is software and hardware with a very affordable bill of materials. We expect to be in perhaps San Francisco and Miami in 2028 for Rivian. In NVIDIA, we expect to be in L.A. and San Francisco in 2027, and then 28 different cities globally by 2028 as well. Really what we're looking for is launches in markets, accelerating our data collect, which is really driving the newer kind of end-to-end models as well, and then starting to really commercialize this model. The numbers are small at this point, but for us, what we're looking at is, first of all, the quality of the service. Second, the utilization of these vehicles.

What we've seen is that launching with us as a partner with the built-in kind of demand that we've got, we can drive very significant utilization per vehicle, often mid to high 20s, low 30s in terms of trips per vehicle per day, which is quite substantial in terms of the needed monetization, as it relates to these vehicles. It's getting partners in market, quality of service, and then obviously the economics of the service that we're looking at. On the delivery side, we're also partnered with a number of partners, whether it's Serve or Cartken, for delivery kind of sidewalk robots. What I am increasingly optimistic about are the potential with drones. We've got, for example, partnerships with Flytrex. There are a number of partnerships coming up in the drone area.

The promise of drones, while it will take time to get the economics down to the kind of economics that can be sustainable with drone delivery. With AVs, it's a really cool experience, it's safe, et cetera, but AVs to some extent are slower than human drivers at this point. We'll see what happens there. Drone delivery can cut the timing of delivery significantly. Already ordering dinner and getting it delivered to your home in 30 minutes is a magical experience. We think in 15 minutes it's going to be, 10-15 minutes, is going to be an even more magical experience. While we're on the sidewalks now as it relates to our delivery business, we're looking forward to getting in the air with some of the partners out there.