Uber has spent the last year quietly pushing beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There’s ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time in the app and you’ll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, “shop for me” concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe.

Under the hood, so to speak, there’s also a lot happening. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-labeling side hustle for these same earners looking to make more moolah, and a six-month-old, business unit called AV Labs, which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that’s separate from Uber’s regular driver network and designed to gather ever-larger amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also holds equity in, but it sure looks like a hedge, as well. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, with Waymo chief among them, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some leverage and optionality.

Whether Uber becomes a full-blown “everything app” similar to some Asian super-apps like Grab, remains an open question. But in this conversation, Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company’s financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year. How did that list get made, and what didn’t make the cut?

SK: Every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff, and a subset of that we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel. 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user’s home city, so we know that travel is something that’s a very common use case for Uber users. Our headline announcement this time was actually introducing hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But travel is so much more than that — you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We heard from a lot of our users that a lot of them had stopped using room service and were just using the Uber Eats app. With “shop for me,” the goal was for us to enable you to shop from any local store even if that store is not available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. Travel really is, in my opinion, the third leg of the stool — we had rides, then we added eats, and now we are adding travel.

Is Uber moving toward offering its own financial services, the way “everything apps” in Asia do?

Financial services for us cuts across multiple different entities — consumers, but also drivers and couriers, and merchants. We have multiple products today focused mostly on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings onto. We are starting to experiment with some of those products for merchants in certain parts of the world right now. As far as consumers are concerned, we’ll see if that makes sense for us in the long term. Right now there is a currency for consumers to use — we call them Uber credits — and this ties to our membership program. On hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, that’s $100 back as credit that you can then use on rides and eats.

Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product?

I’m not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do. We already have announced partnerships with others in the industry who are already providing that service, so that at checkout you have the ability to do that. In terms of our general product strategy, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone.

With boat rentals, in Europe, tapping the tab hands users off to a partner’s own booking flow rather than checking out inside Uber. Is that handoff model a template for what’s coming?

Definitely there are some instances, especially when we are doing something new, for us to rely on our partners, because a two-way integration just does take a lot of time, and in some cases it’s good for us to try before we integrate deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it just makes sense to integrate deeply — we built the entire UI on our own in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand off the rest of the experience to the experts in that field, and if you get great traction, we can always integrate them deeply.

Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings. Do you have data showing the cross-sell actually works — that a delivery user later starts taking more rides?

On the delivery side, it takes you two to three orders for you to break even the monthly fee that you pay. As members get more habituated to the program, it’s increasing their frequency within the line of business they are already using. And it’s also leading to more usage of the other sides of the business — we are seeing people who are mobility only also start to use delivery, and people who are delivery only also start to use mobility.

Delivery has been one of the hardest businesses in tech to make profitable. Is Uber Eats still leaning on ride-hailing to stay healthy?

During the early years of Uber Eats it was not profitable yet, but over the last several quarters, Uber Eats has been independently a profitable business for us, and generating a lot of profit.

A story I wrote this spring framed Uber as unexpectedly competing more directly with Airbnb, which is now offering airport transfers through a partner. Do you see it that way? Who are you most focused on?

There’s no dearth of competitors — Lyft in the U.S., Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola around the world, and on delivery, DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The bigger percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is are we providing our users all the value that we can provide.

You recently wound down the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How do you keep the experience coherent when you’re partnering with — and in some cities competing with — the same supplier?

Phoenix was the first city that we launched with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but our scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided that it doesn’t make sense for us to continue. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but in many cities they’re also a competitor. We are not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider — what we are focusing on is laying down the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, human drivers as well as autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance demand and supply.

Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer autonomy partners that they don’t already have?

We are going to be equipping hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and through that we’ll be collecting millions of miles worth of driving data. That really helps with the long-tail problem — you want to see all the edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there’s so much know-how from our 10 million earners in terms of how pickups and drop-offs work. We handle 25 million lost items every single year — how do you operationally handle that in the world of autonomy? That’s the kind of operational expertise we can bring.

Is Uber selling driver and rider data to Gen AI companies?

I would divide this into two parts. In terms of Gen AI companies, we are able to label data for them using our earner base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have commercial relationships with them and we are selling it to them — that’s a part of the business that is new, and we are extremely bullish about it. AV Labs is separate, and we are still figuring those models out for sharing that data with partners. It’s a little early.

Are drivers recording conversations with riders for this data work?

No, no, no — I want to be very clear, there’s no conversation being recorded as part of that while they’re on a ride. When they’re not on a trip, they’re not driving, they’re not delivering, they’re just talking, or they’re listening to a piece of audio and transcribing it. They get paid for doing that, by the way.

Where has AI actually shown up in ways a rider or driver would notice?

If you are an earner on our platform, we have an earner assistant — the number one question on their mind is how do I make more money, and it will say, look, it’s actually pretty light in the South Bay, but you may want to go five miles away where there’s a lot of demand. On the Eats side, there’s a grocery cart assistant where you can say “I want milk, eggs, bread” and it creates the cart very quickly. And on rides, you’re able to use voice to request a ride — say “I’m looking for a ride to the airport, I have six pieces of luggage, six people.”

So a fully agentic Uber — “plan and book my whole trip” — is on the horizon?

I can’t put a date on it, and I can’t tell you exactly what the feature set will be, but I think AI is going to be a huge enabler of that, where I can leave the complexity to the platform and just tell an agent what exactly I want. Easier said than done — we want to make sure we’re not just checking a box by shipping an agent that maybe doesn’t work that well.

As CPO, how do you personally prioritize with so many ideas in flight?

I would say I spend 70% to 80% of my time making sure that our existing products, or the products we are about to launch, are as solid as possible. All the new ideas are like shiny objects — if you have 100 ideas, maybe five of them are good, and those five then need a lot of cultivation and conviction. So probably 20% of the time is on new ideas — including, by the way, I go out and drive and deliver myself, just to see our product from the other side firsthand.

X has made a “tweak” to its algorithm to boost the visibility of posts to users’ “mutuals” — the people they follow who follow them back, head of product, Nikita Bier, said Monday.

“We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don’t recognize.”

The change may not drastically revamp the site’s user experience, but may make X feel a little bit more like a community rather than a torrent of disparate voices shouting into the digital abyss.

Bier noted that the change would also “help clusters form around interests more easily, which many people have asked for.”

X has introduced a number of changes lately — many of which seem designed to make the site a bigger hub for creators. Earlier this year, the site changed how it compensates accounts in an effort to incentivize original content rather than mere aggregation, and, earlier this month, it also introduced a video editor designed to make it easier for users to work on the platform.

This tweak follows changes that Meta’s Threads has been making to its algorithm aimed at creating communities, largely as a differentiation from its main rival X. For instance, last month Threads rolled out a Your Algo feature which lets users privately control what they see in their feed. It also reached 500 million monthly active users.

Singapore-based video generation startup PixVerse said today that it has closed its Series C extension, with a total of $439 million raised in the round. The company told TechCrunch that, with the new tranche of funding, its valuation has crossed over $2 billion. With the cash, the company aims to expand its world model offering and reach customers across geographies.

The company closed its initial Series C round in March, led by CDH Investments. While it didn’t disclose the funding amount, Bloomberg reported it to be in the range of $300 million. PixVerse said that investors in the extension round include Alibaba, Lollapalooza Capital, Ivy Capital, Grand Mount Capital, Eastern Bell Capital, Mirae Asset, BlueFocus, and CloudAlpha, joining returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s LionX Ventures.

The company was founded by Wang Changhu and Jaden Xie in 2023. Changhu previously worked at ByteDance on computer vision, and Xie was an executive director at investment firm Lighthouse Capital.

PixVerse offers multiple models, including a V-Series video model for consumer and API use, a C-Series video model for professional film and commercial workflows, and an R-Series of world models for game development and world building, which was released earlier this year.

Through its tool, users can generate videos in up to 4k resolution with audio baked in. The startup said that its consumer product has over 150 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users. The company declined to specify how many of them are paying users but it offers a competitive rate of $4.80 per minute of generation for image-to-video.

Xie believes that despite the huge opportunity for video generation to succeed only a few companies are making progress in the market.

“OpenAI exited the business when they shut down Sora 2. Other companies like Meta and Tencent are not able to create high-quality video models. So there are only a few companies that can meet the quality bar,” he told TechCrunch.

He said that there is equal opportunity in the consumer and enterprise markets as users are creating videos for fun and also consuming short video content made with AI, while enterprises are using video generation for creative, learning, and marketing use cases.

However, saying that the startup’s model produces a “high-quality” output is hardly a unique qualifier. Xie mentioned that its core strength lies in labeling.

“We think the key difference is not in data, but how you label it, because data is available everywhere. My co-founder worked at ByteDance, where he built core visual understanding technology behind TikTok using AI. Using this tech, TikTok was able to label data accurately, and build a strong recommendation algorithm. This experience comes in handy when building a video generation platform,” Xie said.

The company has big ambitions this year. It wants to expand its enterprise outreach across the globe. The startup already has a deal with its investor Alibaba to deploy the video generation features.

In terms of product roll out, it plans to launch a new V-series model for video generation, and release a new version of its world model this year. It has 150 employees across offices in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. With the new funding PixVerse aims to hire more researchers and people in go-to-market function.

Despite its confidence in its own models and products, the video market is heating up. There are players like ByteDance with its Seedance model, former Tencent AI head Dr. Wei Liu’s Video Rebirth and Kling AI from Asia. In the west, there are competitors like Midjourney, Runway and Luma. Multiple companies, including Lann YeCunn and Fei Fei Li’s startups, are building world models.