Getaround

» see getaround.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Getaround came out of the inaugural Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University, where the assignment handed to the 2009 class was to leave with an idea capable of improving a billion lives inside a decade. Sam Zaid took the car problem, with Jessica Scorpio and Elliot Kroo alongside him. The observation underneath it has been recycled by every carsharing pitch since: a private car spends the overwhelming majority of its life parked, insured and losing value by the day, while somebody four streets over needs a car for ninety minutes and has no way to ask. The answer was a piece of hardware you fitted to your own car so that a stranger could unlock it from a phone without ever meeting you.

Peer-to-peer carsharing never arrived in Turkey in a form I could have used. Getaround counted eight countries in its own boilerplate at the end and Turkey was not among them, so renting a neighbor's car in Ankara stayed exactly what it had always been, which is asking the neighbor. The model needs a city where parking costs enough to hurt and where owning a car is genuinely optional, and that has never described the places I have lived.

The dating is slightly confused at the source. Wikipedia's infobox gives 9 September 2009 while its own opening sentence says the company was founded in 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt, and the company's marketing always said 2011. The Singularity program ran in 2009 and the Disrupt win in New York came in May 2011, which reconciles the two well enough: incorporated in one year, launched in the other. Money followed the launch and kept following it. SoftBank led a $300 million round on 21 August 2018, and about $568 million of private capital had gone in by the time it reached the public markets.

The board approved an orderly wind-down of the US business on 7 February 2025. The announcement went out on the 11th, the service died at the end of the 12th across fourteen US cities, and most American staff were terminated on the 14th. Interim chief executive AJ Lee put the cause in one sentence: "Despite significant improvements in overall profitability and extensive restructuring efforts, the Company has faced an ongoing lack of liquidity which has made U.S. operations no longer viable."

~ the record ~

~ the december it went public ~

The merger with InterPrivate II Acquisition Corp closed on 8 December 2022 and GETR opened on the New York Stock Exchange the following morning at an equity value of roughly $1.2 billion. It lost about sixty five percent of that on day one. SPAC redemptions had drained most of the trust before closing, so the transaction that was supposed to recapitalize the company delivered a fraction of what it was sized for, into a market window that had already shut.

The filings around that moment explain why the timing was not optional. Getaround burned $63.2 million of operating cash in the first three quarters of 2022, against annual revenue of $63.1 million for the whole of 2021, and had $27.2 million left at the end of the third quarter. It was not choosing to go public in a bad December. It was going public because the alternative was running out.

What followed was a two-year slide with dates on it. The NYSE issued a listing warning in February 2023, a ten percent layoff landed the same month, another thirty percent went on 8 February 2024, and the exchange suspended trading on 10 July 2024. The shares moved to the over-the-counter market, where a company that had been worth $1.2 billion nineteen months earlier traded at a market capitalization around $24 million.

~ the half that survived ~

In April 2019 Getaround paid $300 million for Drivy, the French peer-to-peer rental platform Paulin Dementhon had built across roughly 170 European cities, and in June it added the Norwegian service Nabobil for $12 million. Drivy was rebranded to Getaround on 1 October 2019. That purchase is the reason this grave is for an American company rather than for a brand.

When the US operation stopped in February 2025, the European business did not. It went on renting cars in Norway, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium and Austria under the same name, and on 30 April 2026 the Danish company GoMore bought it for €31.5 million in cash and a note, with about $121.7 million of senior secured debt cancelled as part of the deal. Getaround is now a Danish-owned European carsharing operation.

The address tells the story without help. getaround.com answers with a live site today, offering French, Spanish, Norwegian, Belgian, Austrian and German entry points, still carrying old drivy strings in its asset paths. The path /us redirects to the European homepage. There is no notice, no memorial page, nothing marking that an American company spent fifteen years and most of three quarters of a billion dollars on the thing that used to live there.

~ what dissolution actually pays ~

Mudrick Capital was the lender of last resort from 2024 onward and ended up holding roughly $121.7 million of senior secured debt, converting notes into a 90.9 percent equity stake on 18 June 2026. Once a single creditor owns that much of both sides of the balance sheet, the shareholders are spectators. The European sale proceeds went to the debt.

Stockholders approved dissolution on 29 July 2026 by 108,442,981 votes to 2,192,192, and the certificate of dissolution was filed with the Delaware Secretary of State the same day, closing the transfer books. The board's own expectation, stated plainly in the plan of liquidation, was that common stockholders would receive nothing. On 26 August 2026 the chief restructuring officer and all six directors resigned, leaving the liquidation to a single appointed professional.

HyreCar, the gig-driver rental marketplace Getaround bought out of Chapter 11 for $9.45 million in May 2023, has its own small epilogue. hyrecar.com answers 200 today as a multilingual rental-comparison affiliate page with no connection to the company whose name is on it.

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