Universal invested big money in Uber back in 2008. (No, not that Uber.)

July 2, 2015

So near, and yet so far.

Uber, the private taxi hire company, the one that continues to take the world by storm, was born in October 2008.

In the very same year, Universal Music Group became one of a triumvirate of investors to pump $7.6m into Uber.

Its fellow funders were Discovery Communications and Sterling Stamos Capital Management.

One problem: wrong Uber.

Universal’s investment target, Uber.com, was a ‘social networking and media sharing website designed to enable users to quickly jump in to modern communication media’.

That’s ‘was’ because on September 30 2008, four months after it gladly accepted the major music company’s millions, Uber.com hit the skids and went under.

There’s more to the story, though: Uber.com’s now world-famous domain name was eventually hawked to those controversial taxi types, who wanted it for obvious reasons.

According to a Forbes report from last year, Universal did gain some shares in Uber (the taxi company) out of this domain sale, but soon cashed them in for ‘nominal profit’.

Nearly seven years on, Uber.com is the online hub of a company heading towards a scarcely conceivable valuation of $50bn.

We haven’t muddled up billions and millions there.

Fifty. Billion. Dollars.

It’s a number that may well keep Lucian Grainge up at night.

(Understandably so: it’s 66% bigger than the market cap of UMG parent Vivendi.)

What may ease the big cheese’s voyage into evening slumber is that fact that Universal has also made some very canny investments during his tenure.

Perhaps the canniest of all was its participation in a $2.8m funding round for MOG in April 2008 – a month before UMG splashed the cash on Uber.com.

MOG was subsequently sold to Beats for $14m, which was subsequently sold to Apple for $3bn.

Because of its 13% stake in Beats (aided by that initial backing for MOG), Universal made more than $400m from its sale to Apple.

And, with UMG and early funding in mind, here’s a really interesting new trend.

The major has splashed the cash on numerous investments in the past 13 months at a surprising rate.

Indeed, according to data from Crunchbase, UMG has participated in all of the following funding rounds (plus, almost certainly, a few we don’t know about) since May last year.