Praveen Neppalli Naga - Faz Business

For years, Uber talked about becoming a super app. Then Waymo started picking up passengers in San Francisco, and the conversation grew more urgent. The company has been trying to embed itself inside the AV industry — as a data provider, an investor, and a distribution platform — but the consumer-facing bet may be just as important.

Two weeks ago, Uber held its annual GO-GET product event in New York and announced something its executives had been circling for a long time: users in the U.S. can now book hotels inside the Uber app, through a partnership with Expedia Group, with access to more than 700,000 properties worldwide. Uber One members — the company’s subscription tier at $9.99 a month — get 20% off a rotating list of 10,000 hotels and 10% back in credits. Vacation rentals through Vrbo will follow later this year, along with restaurant reservations via OpenTable. In the meantime, a “Shop for Me” feature lets users order from stores that aren’t even on the platform.

The announcements, taken together, were the most concrete picture yet of something Uber has been trying to conjure since at least 2019: that an app with 199 million monthly active users could become the app they use for nearly everything.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s CTO, offered the clearest explanation of the company’s thinking at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event late last month in San Francisco. The super app concept has existed for years in India and Southeast Asia, he noted, but U.S. versions have mostly flopped by bolting services onto traffic rather than building toward a reason to stay.

His answer to what fits? Membership. Every new category — food, groceries, now hotels — gives someone another reason to pay for Uber One. “I take Uber, go to the airport, take a flight, take another Uber, go to a hotel, go to a restaurant,” he said. “There is a flow you can actually build into it.”

Flights are not available yet, though Naga didn’t rule them out. Uber tried flight booking in Europe years ago without success. “First let’s get the hotel things done,” he said. Financial services sound like a possibility too — Uber already offers a debit card to drivers in Mexico — though how far that goes, or when, remains unclear. Said Naga: “Never say never.”

Uber isn’t alone in this race. Airbnb, arguably the company most directly threatened by Uber’s hotel push, announced its own transportation ambitions in late March — a partnership with Welcome Pickups to offer airport transfers in 125 cities across Asia, Europe, and Latin America, structured to keep users inside the Airbnb app rather than sending them to Uber. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has spent three years promising to turn X into an “everything app” in the WeChat mold, and is now nearing what he describes as a long-stated goal: X Money, a banking and payments platform built inside the social network, is expected to launch publicly soon. X claims 500 million monthly active users.

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The big question is how many super apps the American market will actually support. WeChat works in China partly because the alternative was a patchwork of inferior options. In the U.S., people already have apps they like for most of what Uber wants to do. Getting them to consolidate inside a single platform requires either a compelling reason — Uber One’s discounts, say — or a seamless enough experience that switching feels worth it.

Uber’s bet is that its installed base is the moat. Its users have already handed over a credit card. Convincing them to book a hotel, or order from a store they’d never find on Uber Eats, is an easy lift compared with convincing them to download something new. Its most recent earnings, reported a few days ago, suggest Uber Eats may be the strongest argument for that thesis: delivery revenue grew 34% year over year in the first quarter, to $5.07 billion, making it easily the fastest-growing part of the business and pulling almost even with mobility in gross bookings.

Uber’s stock is still down about 8% from a year ago — suggesting that Wall Street isn’t fully convinced. But the company says that 50 million people are now paying for Uber One, and together they account for roughly half the company’s total bookings.

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Uber has a long-term ambition that goes well beyond shuttling passengers: the company eventually wants to outfit its human drivers’ cars with sensors to soak up real-world data for autonomous vehicle (AV) companies — and potentially other companies training AI models on physical-world scenarios.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.

“That is the direction we want to go eventually,” Naga said of equipping human drivers’ vehicles. “But first we need to get the understanding of the sensor kits and how they all work. There are some regulations — we have to make sure every state has [clarity on] what sensors mean, and what sharing it means.”

For now, AV Labs relies on a small, dedicated fleet of sensor-equipped cars that Uber operates itself, separate from its driver network. But the ambition is clearly much larger. Uber has millions of drivers globally, and if even a fraction of those cars could be transformed into rolling data-collection platforms, the scale of what Uber could offer the AV industry would dwarf what any individual AV company could assemble on its own.

The insight driving the program, Naga said, is that the limiting factor for AV development is no longer the underlying technology. “The bottleneck is data,” he said. “[Companies like Waymo] need to go around and collect the data, collect different scenarios. You may be able to say: in San Francisco, ‘At this school intersection, I want some data at this time of day so I can train my models.’ The problem for all these companies is access to that data, because they don’t have the capital to deploy the cars and go collect all this information.”

Becoming the data layer for the entire AV ecosystem is a pretty smart play, particularly considering Uber years ago abandoned its own ambitions to build self-driving cars (a move that co-founder Travis Kalanick has publicly lamented as a big mistake). Indeed, many industry observers have wondered if, without its own self-driving cars, Uber might one day be rendered irrelevant as AVs increasingly spring up around the globe.

The company currently has partnerships with 25 AV companies — including Wayve, which operates in London — and is building what Naga described as an “AV cloud”: a library of labeled sensor data that partner companies can query and use to train their models. Partners, which Uber plans to more aggressively invest in directly, can also use the system to run their trained models in “shadow mode” against real Uber trips, simulating how an AV would have performed without actually putting one on the road.

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October 13-15, 2026

“Our goal is not to make money out of this data,” Naga said. “We want to democratize it.”

Given the obvious commercial value of what Uber is building, that positioning may not last long. The company has already made equity investments in numerous AV players, and its ability to offer proprietary training data at scale could give it significant leverage over a sector that right now depends on Uber’s ride marketplace to reach customers.

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Tag: Praveen Neppalli Naga

Uber has always wanted to be more than a ride; now it has reason to hurry

Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies