Uber valued at about $51 bln after latest funding round

While Uber may be the hot tech company of the moment, it has also been diligently planning its future, which could include the purchase of an entire fleet of self-driving cars.

Uber’s faster rise to $50 billion reflects its aggressive global expansion into more than 300 cities and growing popularity ferrying millions of riders daily.

Unlike the two auto rental giants – Hertz which is valued at $7.8 billion and Avis at $25 billion – Uber is not a auto service company and does not own vehicle fleets to maintain, which keeps costs down.

Uber is at the top of the pack of billion-dollar plus startups riding a wave of private venture funding. In a deal announced in June, Uber acquired assets related to street imaging and 3-D views used by Microsoft’s Bing Maps service and offered jobs to roughly 100 of its workers. Amit Jain, the president of Uber India, said the company would be committing $1 billion in investment to the region, so it’s likely a few or all of the money recently raised will go there. After the incident, Uber was banned from New Delhi and briefly shut down operations, and the Indian woman who said she was raped sued – one of dozens of lawsuits the company is battling over safety issues and the ways it treats its drivers.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

Taxi-hailing company Uber has completed a $1bn funding round, raising cash from Microsoft and other companies.

Times Internet couldn’t be reached for comment outside regular business hours.

Uber hasn’t publicly discussed plans for an initial public offering, but it has sold convertible debt to investors whose value is tied in part to a future IPO price.

Five years after its launch, Uber is valued at more than $50 billion.