User:Craig at Uber/Uber History Draft

Foundation
Uber was founded by Garrett Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon, and Travis Kalanick in 2009. The company received $200,000 in seed funding that same year. In 2010, Uber raised $1.25 million from backers including First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital, ending its angel round of funding. During the app's development, Uber created a think tank including a nuclear physicist, a computational neurosurgeon and a machinery expert who worked on how to predict demand for private hire car drivers and position their cars where demand is typically highest. Following a beta launch in the summer of 2010, Uber's services and mobile app officially launched in San Francisco in 2011. Initially, Ryan Graves was appointed as CEO after he replied to a tweet by Travis Kalanick. However, Kalanick replaced him in the role later that year. Graves stepped down to become the company's COO.

Renaming and initial adoption
By the end of 2011, Uber had raised $44.5 million in funding. The company expanded into a new city each month after May 2011, including New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. That year, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber. The Uber app's coverage expanded to Paris in December 2011. In May 2012, Uber launched a beta test in Philadelphia, followed by an official launch in the city that June. Later in 2012, Uber launched its Uber Garage initiative in Chicago. The experimental program allowed Uber to partner with local taxi cab drivers, alerting them when an app user requested a ride. The company also introduced uberX in 2012, a service option which allows local drivers to respond to notifications on the Uber app by driving customers in their own non-luxury cars.

International expansion and growth
Uber saw rapid expansion into overseas markets in 2012 and 2013, including a 2012 launch for Canadian services in Toronto, a 90-driver launch in London, a Sydney, Australia launch in November 2012, and a soft launch in Singapore in January 2013. In August, the company began offering its ride services in Seoul. Also during 2013, Uber offered its first non-car option when it launched UBERChopper rides from New York City to the Hamptons for $3000 each.

The rapid expansion of the app's availability and company growth continued in 2014. In June 2014, Uber announced that it had raised $1.2 billion in funding, and it publicized an $18.2 billion valuation. That same month, Uber launched its services in Tijuana, Mexico. In July, Uber launched services in Beijing. In summer 2014, Uber announced it had raised $1.5 billion in venture capital, a total that included the $1.2 billion in funding. The company launched black car services in Warsaw, Poland and uberX services in Seoul. Uber also began its services in Anchorage, Alaska in September, 2014.

The rapid expansion was accompanied by regulatory issues and controversies. In April 2014, Uber was banned by the government in Berlin, although the company remains active in other German cities. The ban is still being discussed as of December 2014. Taxi drivers in London, Berlin, Paris and Madrid staged a large-scale protest against Uber on June 11, 2014.

In August 2014, Uber launched UberPOOL, a carpooling service, in San Francisco and UberFRESH, a lunch delivery service, in Santa Monica.

The Wall Street Journal reported on December 5, 2014, that Uber has raised US$1.2 billion from a number of investors, including sovereign wealth fund Qatar Investment Authority, New Enterprise Associates, and hedge funds Valiant Capital Partners and Lone Pine Capital. The successful investors, the names of which Uber did not disclose, participated in a competitive bidding process that lasted several weeks, and their investments meant that Uber was worth US$41 billion. The article only referred to "people familiar with the matter" in regard to the sources of its information.

On December 12, 2014, TechCrunch reported that the Chinese search engine Baidu, the mainland's largest, is expected to make a significant investment in Uber. The agreement was confirmed on December 17, 2014, following a Beijing meeting involving Kalanick and Baidu chief executive and chairman Robin Lee, who made a commitment to connect the search engine's map and mobile-search features with Uber’s app. At the time of the arrangement, Uber existed in eight Chinese mainland cities. Kalanick told the media afterward of an absence of "pressing regulatory issues" for Uber in China.

In January 2015, Uber announced a departure from its previous marketing and expansion strategy, which Kalanick had called "principled confrontation." Uber's new multi-tiered approach includes collaborating with local municipalities to compromise on new taxi regulations. Since implementing this new strategy, Uber has seen 17 new cities pass pro-Uber ordinances. Additionally, The Boston Globe announced that Uber had worked out an unprecedented arrangement with the city of Boston to share quarterly data on the duration, locations, and times of day in which riders used the app to travel in or out of the city. This information was first delivered to the city in February 2015, and the report kept all individual user data private.

Also in February 2015, Uber announced a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon to found the Uber Advanced Technology Center, a new facility in Pittsburgh meant to support research in the development of self-driving vehicles. Additionally, Uber expanded its UberPOOL services to Los Angeles and New York City, expanding further in March, to offer UberPOOL in Austin, Texas, in anticipation of the South by Southwest festival. In April 2015, Uber renamed its UberFRESH program as UberEATS and expanded the service to include Barcelona, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.

The following month, Uber launched its UberMilitary Families Coalition, a new project to support its existing UberMilitary initiative. The project seeks to partner Uber with existing military family organizations and hire more military dependents, in addition to veterans, as drivers. Also in May 2015, Uber updated its app to include accommodations for drivers who are deaf or hard of hearing.