PayPal revealed on Friday that it plans to invest $500 million in Uber ahead of the ride-hailing firm’s much-anticipated initial public offering (IPO). It also extended the partnership between the two companies, which goes back to 2013. As part of the extension, PayPal will look into “future commercial payment collaborations, including the development of Uber’s digital wallet”, PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman wrote on LinkedIn. This is the second major investment PayPal has made in the past few months. In March, it put $750 million into Argentina’s MercadoLibre, its biggest investment to date as an independent company, reported TechCrunch. With auctions, a marketplace for buyers and sellers to connect, and a payments system called MercadoPago, Mercadolibre bears a distinct resemblance to eBay, which PayPal split from in 2014, the report said. In its latest earnings report last week, PayPal said that eBay Marketplaces volume declined by 4% in Q1 2019 and represented a mere 9.7% of its total payment volume (TPV) versus 12.7% a year ago. PayPal also reported revenues of $4.13 billion for the quarter ended March 31. The company said it added 9.3 million active accounts in the quarter and now has 277 million active accounts in all, including 22 million merchant accounts. Uber's IPO could value it at $91 billion Earlier this month, Uber publicly filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering that could give it a valuation as high as $91 billion and put it among the largest US tech…
