Uber acquires Brooklyn bicycle company for reported $100 million

“My Uber’s here” could have a totally different connotation in the future, following a massive purchase by the ride-hailing app of Brooklyn-based bicycle startup JUMP.

Uber did not make public the price it paid for the New Lab–based startup, but Bloomberg is reporting via unnamed sources that it’s $100 million.

JUMP and Uber have already been cooperating in San Francisco, the city of early adopters and beta testers, to try out the idea of a dockless electric bikeshare program. (It’s a concept JUMP has also experimented with in D.C.)

OK, what do those words mean in that order?

Dockless: Users of the bike tab on Uber will be able to see where available bikes are located near them. The bikes can be locked to any public bike rack in the city, unlike the Citi Bikes we might be more familiar with, which have to be parked and locked in to one of several hundreds of docks around the city.

Electric: Biking the hills of San Francisco (or the bridges of Brooklyn) can be a pain, but electric bicycles have their own, electric motors to use in those situations. If you’ve ever been huffing and puffing while a deliveryman with a thick-stemmed bike whizzes past you, you’re already familiar with electric bikes.

Lockin’ it up. (Courtesy photo)

Bikeshare: In the same way that Uber is a ride-share company, JUMP is a bike-share company. This is a bit of a misnomer as all the bikes are owned by JUMP and some of Uber’s drivers rent their cars from Uber itself. So the “sharing” part might be better understood as “bike-hailing” or “bike-finding.”

The price of the ride is $2 for up to 30 minutes.

JUMP was founded in 2010 by Ryan Rzepecki and is based in New Lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. According to an email from New Lab, JUMP’s bikes are prototyped and tested in New Lab and around the Navy Yard campus. It had raised $11.6 million previously, according to Crunchbase.