Getaround, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car sharing service, raises $300M Series D led by SoftBank: source says at more than $800M post-money valuation
SoftBank Group Corp. is leading a $300 million funding round into Getaround, a San Francisco-based car-sharing service.
Context & Ripple Effects
Getaround's $300M Series D is the payoff to months of reported courtship: Axios flagged SoftBank investing in a roughly $100M round back in May 2018, and the final check came in three times that size, pushing post-money past $800M. It builds on the $45M Series C from Toyota that anchored the company's global partnership strategy.
The round marks Getaround's arrival as one of SoftBank's mobility bets, and the corpus shows what followed: a $300M acquisition of Paris-based Drivy within a year, a Series D extension near $1.7B, then a pandemic-era search for a buyer before the PeopleFund-led Series E.
First-order effects
- Getaround gains a war chest sized for international expansion, converting SoftBank's reported interest into balance-sheet firepower roughly triple the originally discussed round.
Second-order effects
- The valuation print — more than $800M post-money, later marked near $1.7B in the Series D extension — resets the pricing benchmark every other peer-to-peer car-sharing operator must raise against.
Third-order effects
- The full arc — mega-round, top-of-cycle valuation, then a reported sale process once COVID-19 hit — illustrates how SoftBank-scale private capital can outrun a marketplace's fundamentals, leaving late-stage investors exposed when demand shocks arrive.
The trend: SoftBank's mega-rounds are resetting private valuations across peer-to-peer mobility marketplaces, with the 2020 downturn exposing how far ahead of revenue those marks had run.