Lyft: From Zimride and Pink Mustaches to a $237 Million Driver Settlement

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Lyft began with Logan Green's long drives between UC Santa Barbara and his girlfriend in Los Angeles. In 2007 he and John Zimmer launched Zimride, an intercity carpooling board for college students. In the summer of 2012 they tested an on-demand offshoot called Lyft, and it took over: the company renamed itself in May 2013 and sold Zimride to Enterprise Rent-A-Car that July. Early rides came with giant fuzzy pink mustaches on car grilles, front seat riding and fist bumps, until late 2014 when the mustache shrank to a small glowing dashboard version. Shared rides, Toronto and Ottawa, and a 2018 Allscripts partnership for patient transport followed, leading to a March 2019 IPO at a $24.3 billion valuation.

The pandemic forced nearly 1,000 layoffs in April 2020, and in April 2021 Lyft sold its self-driving division to Toyota for $550 million, later plugging Waymo and May Mobility vehicles into its network instead. CEO David Risher, hired in March 2023, cut deeply and shut Lyft Rentals, and in the second quarter of 2024 the company posted its first GAAP profit. It then bought Free Now for 175 million euros, TBR Global and bike share operators. In October 2026 Lyft agreed to pay California $237 million over driver classification from 2016 to 2020.

• Lyft coordinates about nine million rides a day for 25 million active riders.
• In 2018 it spent $72 million on London's Blue Vision Labs to build robotaxi technology it later sold.
• A late 2018 class action over unwanted automated text messages cost $4 million plus legal fees.
• A Detroit rapper's weight discrimination lawsuit, filed after a driver refused her ride, was settled out of court.
• The California payment was recorded as the largest wage theft settlement in the state's history.