Lyft creates Lyfties to highlight 2015 destinations

Beating Uber to the punch, Lyft launches awards to wrap up the year's hot spots

With the new year just a couple days away, almost every media and technology company has released some sort of content to wrap up 2015.

For Google, it means highlighting the top search trends of the year. For Facebook and Twitter, it means looking at the personal moments and public news stories that dominated feeds. For media sources (even VatorNews!), it means publishing several year-end stories aggregating the biggest and most surprising headlines of 2015.

Now Lyft has found a way to get in on the feel-good, year-end action.

The ride-hailing company for the first time unveiled the Lyftie Awards, analyzing Lyft ride data from the year to identiy the top most visited places, including restaurants, bars, event spaces, transit stops, and more.

The company released "Local Lyfties" data for most major cities across the U.S., including Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a handful of others. Here are the national winners:

• Most Visited Restaurant: Tacolicious (SF)
• Most Visited Bar: The Abbey (LA)
• Most Visited Coffee Chain: Starbucks
• Most Visited Business School: Harvard Business School
• #1 Drop-Off Category: Transit Stops

While several of the winners weren’t necessarily big surprises (did we really need an analysis of the most visited coffee chain?), what is most surprising to me is that Lyft beat its massive competitor Uber to do something like this.

Uber is something of a specialist when it comes to entertaining marketing stunts (e.g. delivering puppies and ice cream via Uber) so one would think they’d release a yearly ranking of popular locations too. It’s a relatively effective way to assert that you have comprehensive location data because everyone uses your service.

This isn’t Lyft’s first news this week either.

Yesterday it was revealed that Saudi Arabian investment holding company Kingdom Holding Company had led a $247.7 million investment in Lyft in exchange for 5.3 percent of the company. Analysts believe the new investment nearly doubles Lyft’s valuation from $2.5 billion to $4.92 billion.

Though other participants haven’t been disclosed, Kingdom Holding (with Prince al-Waleed bin Talal as its chairman and CEO) is well-known for its international investments in companies as diverse as McDonald’s, News Corp., and Twitter.

Lyft has declined to comment on the new funding, but sources believe this round is just one-fourth of the company's effort to raise as much as $1 billion in new capital. Before the funds from Kingdom Holding, Lyft had raised $1 billion from Icahn Enterprises, Rakuten, Coatue Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Mayfield Fund, and a few seed investors (FLOODGATE, K9 Ventures, fbFund).