Uber Pays 147 Riders $450 to Celebrate 2 Billion Rides

It took Uber over six years to complete its first one billion rides, having reached the milestone in December 2015 (Uber was founded in 2009). Just six months later, in June 2016, it achieved the remarkable feat of completing another billion rides, CEO Travis Kalanick announced today in a Facebook post. That means the app has been handling millions of rides per day on average since the beginning of this year.

In fact, 147 rides began at exactly the same second, tying for the two-billionth trip. These rides were hailed in 16 different countries on five separate continents, from Costa Rica to Russia to Australia, with the largest share of them happening in China. TechCrunch reports that the 147 riders and drivers will each receive $450, symbolic of the 450 cities that Uber now operates in, as a reward for helping the company edge past the 2 billion mark.

On his Facebook post, Kalanick noted that the longest trip exceeded an hour as a driver and passenger worked their way through traffic in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city, while the shortest trip was a POOL trip in Changsha, China that lasted just three minutes.

If this exponential growth rate holds, Uber may handle another one billion rides before the year is out. The massive ride-sharing company has been raising money for its coffers at a lively clip as well, having recently raised $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and $1.15 in leveraged loans, Reuters reports.

However, Uber is not without its competitors, especially in China, which is its largest market. There, a Chinese-made ride-hailing app called Didi Chuxing is far outpacing Uber’s growth. Whereas it took Uber six years to complete one billion rides, The Verge reports that Didi completed 1.43 billion rides in 2015 alone.