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BlaBlaCar Buys Less to Plug a Carpooling Tech Gap

Sean O'Neill photo
Sean O'Neill
blablacar

Photo Credit: Nicolas Brusson, Co-founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar, sheds his customary French couture jacket to fit in with the Silicon Valley look of Lyft CEO Logan Green and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. We wonder why. BlaBlaCar

Skift Take

It’s too early to know if short-distance, urban carpooling from BlaBlaCar can effectively compete with taxis and car-hailing apps like Cabify, Lyft, and Uber. But as a defensive experiment, the move makes sense.

Long-distance carpooling service BlaBlaCar has acquired Less, a carpooling app primarily to nab its sophisticated real-time technology for arranging rides. The Paris-based companies did not disclose the terms of the deal. Less had secured $19 million (€16 million) in its Series A round of fundraising, led by Index Ventures and Daphni. In the U.S. and China, there is no significant carsharing counterpart to BlaBlaCar, which enables long-distance carpooling. Europe's density and t

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