Sources: SoftBank-backed car-rental startup Getaround, once valued at $1B+, is actively seeking a sale as it deals with the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak
The car-sharing company Getaround is actively seeking a sale as the coronavirus outbreak has sent demand plunging and left …
Context & Ripple Effects
Getaround's sale search caps a steep twelve-month descent: SoftBank led a $300M Series D in 2018, followed by a $201.5M extension at a ~$1.7B valuation last September, and then January brought a planned layoff of roughly 150 employees — about a quarter of staff — to mitigate rising costs before the outbreak even hit.
First-order effects
- With COVID-19 having sent rental demand plunging, Getaround has no realistic private fundraising path left, making a sale the only liquidity route for SoftBank and earlier backers like Toyota.
- A buyer inherits a company already cut by a quarter of its headcount, so the transaction itself becomes the next round of restructuring rather than a rescue.
Second-order effects
- Any deal will be priced against the ~$1.7B peak rather than current fundamentals, forcing a markdown that reprices SoftBank's other capital-intensive shared-mobility positions.
- Rival peer-to-peer car-sharing operators face the same collapsed demand with no SoftBank-scale backstop, pushing the whole category toward consolidation or exit.
Third-order effects
- The endgame the corpus records — Getaround eventually shutting down US operations, including HyreCar, to focus on six European countries — shows the pattern resolving as geographic retreat from the US peer-to-peer market rather than recovery.
- If the sequence holds, SoftBank's method of underwriting unproven demand with nine-figure checks gets structurally repriced by limited partners and later-stage investors alike.
The trend: COVID-19 is forcing SoftBank's high-valuation shared-mobility bets into discounted exits, stress-testing whether big-check demand underwriting can survive a sudden demand shock.