People in Indian tech centres of companies usually do back-end and maintenance work; what do Uber’s India tech centres do?
I think I’ve seen that happen in other companies and I think they’re missing out. Right from the beginning, we were very clear that we will be leveraging the talent here to build our core technology. Like in Bengaluru, our teams work on the core platform that is a critical path of our regular functioning around the world, which is our API platform. If that doesn’t work, then Uber will not work. So, that’s just a testament to how we are operating from India. If we do global tech sites, we can actually understand and help each other. I think if you don’t do it, you’re missing out.
Are you tapping into government and state-level public data that’s being built in India right now?
Yes and no. I mean, yes, we are able to leverage this data, I think we have some partnerships with city governments. In certain cities, in the US, the cities actually want to work with us to help. In these cases, we use the data to help make decisions.
Same thing in India. Wherever it’s available, we use it, and it’s an ongoing work for us. This is why we actually want to partner with the Government of Karnataka to be able to build a tech centre in one of their universities and actually partner with them very closely.
Basically, build a centre of excellence for transportation. That helps us to integrate with some of the public data to see how we can solve state-level problems in terms of traffic, usage and all that.
So in this case, the Uber platform is also going to be leveraged by a public body as well, right?
Yes. In places where we’re able to offer Uber as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, they’re able to leverage. I think we have that in some places. Not in India, but other places.
How is the tech adapting to the change in mobility with electric vehicles (EVs) etc?
I think the tech has to be ready by the time this comes to scaling. We are already doing some of this. Like in the US, we have thousand-odd Tesla cars being rented through Hertz (a rental car company).
Are flying taxis and really futuristic means of transport still within the tech purview?
Absolutely. We are building our tech and we are already partnering with third parties, like New York Cabs, San Francisco Cabs, and Auto Cab in Europe. That’s the tech we are building, which we will be able to expand to be able to bring in, say, autonomous cars. But we’re making sure we understand which routes those will work on. Autonomous might not work on all the roads.
