Apparently Uber is bleeding about $2 billion a year and have only $6.6 billion in cash reserve. If this deal adds $1 billion more cash, then that would only last 4 years.
Since full-scale self-driving cars launching across most major cities is unlikely to happen within 4 years, they will need to either:
1) Charge more and lose even more market share to Lyft. This is unlikely.
2) Raise more cash. IPO seems to be the easiest channel for them now. (Maybe SoftBank will provide it from their massive fund but they might also extract concessions from existing shareholders and buy at a very ‘attractive’ price (for SoftBank) but others will likely resist.)
IPO sounds like a good plan for Uber. But if the price drops precipitously at some point afterward because it is outcompeted by other self-driving companies (e.g. Waymo + Lyft expands self-driving fleets to highly profitable market while Uber’s tech is still not ready) it may result in a chilling effect on the overall startup IPO scene as they are the largest unicorn in existence, and there are many startups that sell themselves as Uber for X. (Public investors may not be as astute as VCs in discerning differences in business models of similar sounding startups.)