Uber’s Compititor Lyft Inc. Acquires Digi-Billboard Startup Halo Cars

US-based ride-sharing company Lyft Inc. has recently acquired car-top Digi-billboard startup Halo Cars in an undisclosed amount. According to the market analyst, this move by Lyft is considered one of the brilliant moves. Halo will aid Lyft with profitability.  

Nowadays, it’s hard to make a profit in the ride-sharing business alone, so ride-hailing services move to some alternative business in pursuit of generating profit. After the largest rival Uber Technologies Inc investment in different sectors in search of profit, although it gains no return from those side businesses. Now, Lyft has extended its pace with this move to uplift its growth, which is liked by analysts as well. 

Halo Cars was founded by Kenan Saleh, Faizan Bhatty, Ryanne Fadel, and Nabeel Farooqui in 2018. Halo delivers advertisements on LED billboards over the car-roof. It works like Google Adsense, which shows pop-up ads on the rooftop of cabs that come out just like your computer screen and roam around the city.

From long, Lyft was in search of acquiring the media division team for its company, whereas the acquisition of Halo has now compensated the want of Lyft. To generate revenues for cabs and traditional taxis, the purchase of Halo is the easiest and brilliant avenue chosen by Lyft. Though Halo is a wholly new and small startup, however, it operates in a couple of large US cities like Chicago and New York. 

Lately, Uber has also been seen in testing outdoor car-top billboards through in alliance with a startup called Cargo. Now the acquisition of Halo by Lyft may again raise fierce competition between the two firms. Comparatively, Lyft is pretty small in case of size, users, and presence whereas, Lyft has reported a growth of active rider customer base from 22.3 million to 22.9 million in the previous quarter. On the other hand, Uber holds  111 million active rider customers globally.