Volvo acquires Luxe | Hacker News Reader

Volvo acquires Luxe

techcrunch.com

77 pointsprostoalex13 comments

This seems like a talent acquisition play. There was probably a lot of work that went into find a soft place for the whole team to land; so, kudos to the leaders / investors / whomever helped make this happen.

It's not a big exit, but if you are a luxe employee, it's the best of the worst outcomes.

> It's not a big exit, but if you are a luxe employee, it's the best of the worst outcomes.

This data wasn't in the article. It is probably the more likely outcome, but we just don't know (yet).

i know this isn't definitive, but the article does include: "One source close to the deal tells us that the terms here were closely guarded, and that the assumption at this point is that it was ‘pennies on the dollar’ based on the last valuation."

Sounded like a fire sale.

What's Volvo's motivation here? The entire Luxe business model was wildly unprofitable and the UX as a consumer (egregious weight times at both drop off and pick up) was awful.

I used it a few times in Seattle under a promo, and it was so painful. Getting the timing down so the valet wasn't waiting out in the rain for awhile waiting for me was difficult, and than it always took 15-20 minutes longer for them to get my car back to me than what was shown in the app. I found myself better off just using Lyft when I'm worried about parking.

We had a dedicated Luxe team at my workplace for valet services and it was pretty sweet until they discontinued, likely due to cost. I thought the app and service was pretty good.

Probably an acquihire to bolster their product/engineering team with some startup blood. Luxe will likely get shuttered.

It was less awful than driving around soma for 2 hours trying to find a spot.

How can you be a tech company and expect to make tech company margins when all you do is aggregate demand, parking spots and valets to match them. Luxe making $3/hr x 200 valets and maybe a bit more on the parking arbitrage during peak hrs.

Sounds like any of the local garage joints. I feel some markets are best left fragmented.

Not sure about "fragmented" but perhaps not VC-appropriate.

This stuff will all go away once (a) the non top-tier investors realize their entire portfolios are underwater and (b) interest rates rise a bit.

Stepping back, it is pretty remarkable that a company I've heard of, with a launched product and some degree of use, just _fails_ like this. Tech entrepreneurship is hard.

More proof that if you lose money on every transaction, you can't make it up in volume.

The on-demand valet parking space has been a great place to lose money. Zirx pivoted, Caarbon failed and now this acqui-hire of Luxe which was somehow valued at $157M in its last round.[1]

Other companies in the space haven't raised in a while including Ubo of China and ValetAnywhere.

[1] source: CB Insights

Reasonable acquisition to expand the Volvo Concierge [0] services. The digital services are likely the strongest selling point in a few years when luxuary car makers all offers self driving, electric powered cars.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPKDy7k5hHE

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