Uber has grown faster in its first five years than Facebook did

Five years ago today, Uber launched its first service in San Francisco. Since then, the taxi-hailing app has expanded at an incredible pace - it's now available in 311 cities across 58 countries worldwide.

That growth has translated to massive valuation numbers: in its third year, Uber was already worth $3.4 billion, and last year it raised at a $40 billion valuation. Latest reports indicate Uber is now raising another round at a $50 billion price tag.

Uber's valuation growth is all the more impressive when you compare it to Facebook's early years. According to BI Intelligence, it took three years for the social media giant to get to a billion-dollar "unicorn" valuation, and it was "only" worth $15 billion by its fifth year. It took almost 8 years for Facebook to get to the $50 billion threshold, before hitting its massive $100 billion IPO in 2012. Facebook is now worth around $225 billion.

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