In April 2025 Lyft bought FreeNow from BMW and Mercedes-Benz for 175 million euros. Lyft's own release puts it at "approximately €175 million or $197 million"; Reuters' headline rounded it to $200 million, while the body of the same piece gives the euro figure. The deal closed on 31 July 2025, and the platform now trades as FreeNow by Lyft.

Read as market news it is small. Read for what was paid for, it says something that in Italy is usually repeated the other way round.

They did not buy cars

One line in the deal announcement is worth all the others: taxis were about 90% of FreeNow's gross bookings in 2024.

That is value, not number of rides, and the distinction matters: taxi fares are larger than scooter or car-sharing fares, so a share of value is not a share of trips. Either way, it was not 90% of an owned fleet. It was 90% from vehicles, licences and drivers belonging to somebody else.

FreeNow operated in more than 150 cities across nine countries at the time of the announcement, Italy included, and over 180 by the time the deal closed. In 2024 the platform had reached breakeven with revenue up 13%, and the credit it took, in its own words, was for the work on taxis.

So two carmakers sold a mobility platform, and the buyer paid for the part made of other people's taxi drivers.

Seventeen months later

An acquisition is judged by how it ages. On 6 August 2026 Lyft reported record gross bookings, $5.50 billion for the quarter, and said that in Europe FreeNow is performing better on an organic basis, integrated into the global platform.

This was not a defensive diversification that later deflated. It was a bet on an idea, and so far the idea holds.

Why a local dispatch company should care

FreeNow's chief executive, speaking to Reuters on the day of the announcement, said where he sees the room to grow: almost half of Europe's taxi sector is still offline. That is a statement from an interested party, not research, and it should be read as such. But it describes the perimeter of the game well.

That offline half is not a void. It is made of dispatch centres that work, radios that answer, customers who call a number saved in their contacts twenty years ago. Seen from outside it is a market not yet collected; seen from inside it is a trade.

So the question is not whether a dispatch company should digitise. It is which network it ends up inside when it does, and who owns the relationship with the customer once the work arrives through an app that is not theirs.

The point

Aggregating licensed operators has a market price, and somebody paid it: 175 million for a network in which nine tenths of the value were other people's taxis. That is not an opinion about the future of the sector. It is a figure on a signed contract.

Original (Italian): Quanto vale una rete di tassisti che non sono tuoi, 175 milioni

Disclosure: I build UrbanGo, dispatch software for licensed taxi and private-hire operators. Everything above is sourced; this paragraph is the part where I sell something.