Uber, Wayve and Waymo are headed towards a robotaxi showdown in London

For the past 10 years, Uber’s annual Lost & Found Index has provided a rather quirky anthropological snapshot of its riders — and even a few insights into society. The annual catalogue of millions of forgotten items ranges from mundane modern-day tools such as smartphones and laptops, to more eyebrow-raising objects like live fish, an ankle monitor, a toboggan, a package of live butterflies, and a single Louboutin shoe. This year, Uber is using the report to highlight the same old problem of lost items with a new twist: robotaxis. Thousands of items (it’s a bit too new for millions) were left behind in robotaxis on Uber’s ride-hailing network in the past year, the company said Tuesday. There were the usual suspects of phones, keys, wallets, passports, and headphones, along with a few items that strayed into the who-is-this-rider category: a set of dentures, an “I Heart Hot Dads” bag, and a blue hat that reads “Emotional Support Human.” Beyond this entertaining list lies a business opportunity, if a minor one. Even in a future of robot taxis, someone still has to return the things passengers leave behind. Uber has spent the past several years locking up dozens of partnerships with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology companies. But it really wasn’t until March 2025, when the “Waymo on Uber” robotaxi service launched in Austin, that the commercial wheels on its AV business started turning. Since then, Uber and Waymo have also started a robotaxi service in Atlanta. Uber has added other AV companies to its app in the past year, including Motional in Las Vegas and Avride in Dallas, although these still have human safety operators behind the wheel. That Uber has already logged thousands of lost items in just 12 months gives some sense of just how many robotaxi rides have been completed on its app. The underlying message here is that Uber’s existing network is already set up to reunite riders with their lost items, including a 15-pound yo-yo, one large black marble duck, a Squishmallow, and a Charli XCX poster. When an Uber rider forgets belongings in a robotaxi, the process for recovering them is similar to any other Uber ride: open the app, click the activity tab, select the trip during which the item was lost, and contact customer support. Riders are then able to message, chat, or call a support agent. If the item is located, they have two options: pay $15 for an Uber Courier driver to provide same-day local delivery, or pick up the belonging in person from an AV depot, where the vehicles are stored and serviced. Uber Courier is a rebrand of Uber Connect, which launched in 2020 and allowed users to send packages and personal items between local addresses. But Uber says there is more to its robotaxi support network than repurposing existing services. “With tens of millions of lost items reported on Uber each year, we’ve spent the last decade building systems that help riders quickly and seamlessly reunite with their belongings,” Amy Satrom, global head of autonomous support at Uber, said in a statement. “As autonomous rides continue to scale on Uber, we’re bringing that same expertise to AVs — combining our fleet operations, support teams, and hybrid network to make getting a lost item back simple, even when there’s no driver behind the wheel.” In February, the company announced Uber Autonomous Solutions, a new business division that conveys its bigger ambitions around driverless tech. The division provides companies with a suite of services that handle all the tasks associated with operating a robotaxi, self-driving truck, or sidewalk delivery robot business, including software and support services. And Uber clearly means to make AVs a major revenue driver. The company plans to offer robotaxi rides through its app in as many as 15 cities globally by the end of the year and has said it intends to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world by 2029. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small

Amazon was one of several tech giants that on Wednesday beat Wall Street’s first-quarter earnings expectations, offering more financial evidence that the AI boom continues to reward companies that supply the picks and shovels. Amazon’s cloud business is the latest example. Amazon Web Services, buoyed by its role in fueling the AI boom, saw its net sales increase 28% year-over-year, climbing to $37.6 billion, the company said Wednesday. It was the fastest growth rate for AWS in 15 quarters, Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s earnings call. Jassy attributed AWS’ success to its role in providing compute to the AI industry. “It’s very unusual for business to grow this fast on a base this large. The last time we saw growth at this clip, AWS was roughly half the size,” Jassy said. “We’ve never seen a technology grow as rapidly as AI. Amazon is already a leader, and companies continue to choose AWS for AI.” Jassy compared the business unit’s growth to the aughts. “To put our growth in perspective, three years after AWS launched, it had a $58 million revenue run rate. [During] the first three years of this AI wave, AWS’s AI revenue run rate is over $15 billion — nearly 260 times larger.” Even as money flows into its cloud business, Amazon is also sinking increasingly large gobs of capital into building out the infrastructure that supports that cloud. Jassy said on Wednesday that capital expenditure growth would continue in the near term. “The faster AWS grows, the more short-term capex we’ll spend,” he said. “AWS has to lay out cash for land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear, in advance of when we can monetize it.” Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 Jassy positioned these investments as short-term cash burn for a long-term payoff, noting that these capital expenditures fund assets like data centers that last more than 30 years or chips, servers, and networking gear that have a useful life for five to six years. Jassy did attempt to quell investor fears that the e-commerce giant was spending too much on infrastructure. He also provided more than a hint at how that kind of spending would affect free cash flow. “In times of very high growth like now — where the capex growth meaningfully outpaces the revenue growth — the early years, free cash flow is challenged,” he said. Amazon’s first-quarter earnings report reflects the pull on free cash flow. T he company reported that free cash flow decreased to $1.2 billion for the trailing twelve months, driven primarily by a year-over-year increaseof $59.3 billion in purchases of property and equipment — much of its related to AI. That’s a 95% drop from the $25.9 billion in free cash flow it had in the first quarter of 2025. “We’ve been through this cycle with the first big AWS growth wave, and like the results. We expect to feel similarly about this next wave with much larger potential downstream revenue and free cash flow,” he added. The e-commerce giant’s overall sales, meanwhile, rose 17% to $181.5 billion on a year-over-year basis. Sales grew 12% in North America and 19% throughout the rest of the world, the company reported. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com. View Bio

Uber customers in the United States can now book hotels directly through the app, one of several new features announced Wednesday that pushes far beyond the company’s original ride-hailing purpose and even deeper into its users’ lives. Uber announced the new hotel booking feature on Wednesday during its product-heavy annual Go-Get event in New York City. At launch, Uber customers will have access to more than 700,000 hotels worldwide through a partnership with Expedia Group, the travel company that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi led for 12 years. Uber said vacation rental inventory from startup Vrbo will be added to the app later this year. Image Credits:Uber And in a pitch to sell more customers on its Uber One subscription, Uber said members will get 20% discounts off of a rolling list of 10,000 hotels when booked through the app. Members will also receive 10% back in Uber Credits on all bookings. “We’re no longer just an app for rides, or even two apps, or [a] family of apps for both rides and eats,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the company’s event. “Uber is now an app for everything, where you can go, you can get and now you can travel,” he said. The hotel bookings, new AI-powered voice bookings feature, and a widespread search tool are among a handful of new products unveiled Wednesday that went from idea to launching in the app within months thanks to agentic AI tools like Cursor, Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga told TechCrunch. “What we have seen the last few months is a fundamental reset, a new way of building software,” Naga said, adding that this shift began late last year with the emergence of agentic AI. Naga said a feature like the hotel bookings would have taken at least a year to — a lengthy process that includes the initial development, building it, and then testing and debugging before launching it to customers. That timeframe has been cut in half; and he expects now that more engineers have adopted these agentic AI workflows, they will move even faster. “Our problems generally at Uber, it’s not the problem of not having ideas; there’s so many things we want to build,” he said. “It’s just always the problem of, we don’t have enough time or resourcing to build these things.” During its Go-Get event, Uber also launched travel mode, which gives users a guide covering tourist hotspots, local favorites, and other helpful information directly related to where they’re visiting. Uber extended the travel mode to its Uber Eats delivery product as well, by adding a “room service” hub that lists commonly forgotten items. This feature will eventually include curated dining recommendations and the option to book a table through OpenTable. The company is also rolling out a feature called “Eats for the Way,” which allows customers who have reserved an Uber Black to also order a drink or snack that will be in the vehicle when it arrives. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive. You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal. View Bio