20 Million members across 18 Markets: Blablacar acquires Carpooling.com & What's Next?

Blablacar, the number 1 ride-sharing platform, has acquired its largest competitor Carpooling.com, adding a variety of new markets and creating a pan-European ride-sharing platform. In addition, Blablacar also made an acquisition of Hungarian Autohop – the two acquisitions will bring Blablacar across all of Europe (“From Amsterdam to Prague,” as they put it), and will remove Blablacar’s once largest competitor from the table.
The terms of the acquisition were not announced; however, the entire Munich-based Carpooling.com team will be joining Blablacar, and it is known that Carpooling.com raised $10 Million in 2012 in order to launch in the United States, a launch which never fully got off the ground.
Blablacar how now cemented itself as one of the largest sharing economy communities in the world – the marketplace, which recently expanded into India and last year into Russia, now counts over 20 Million members across 18 markets.
Blablacar is said to be working on plans to launch in South America later this year – historically, Blablacar CEO & Co-Founder Frederic Mazzella has avoided the US market, saying that the market was not mature enough for organized ridesharing, and that the market dynamics (like distance between destinations) was not the same as in Europe and other markets; however, with each new market they enter, Blablacar must be formerly in the back of its collective mind an idea of how Americans would use the service to BlaBla their way across America – it is, after all, one of America’s greatest charms.