Despite nearly constant criticism from the media, ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. continues to plow ahead, as a report Thursday claimed it’s in talks to acquire Luxe Valet Inc., a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in on-demand valet parking.

Founded in 2013, Luxe aimed to make users “fall in love with parking.” It claimed to be creating a logistics platform that would drive the next generation of local real-time services, beginning with parking. The service, which is only available in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City, allows users, via an app, to book someone who will take their car from them and park it, whether they are in the vicinity for work or pleasure.

However, the company was reported in late April to be shutting down its door-to-door service, though it insisted it would be starting a new service with undisclosed features this summer. It also conceded it had laid off some of its staff as well.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the acquisition, which is described as being in “advanced talks,” would seem to be an “acquihire,” since Uber is mostly interested in bringing on part of the engineering team from Luxe rather than running the valet parking service. The same report claims that Luxe Chief Executive Officer Curtis Lee and co-founder Craig Martin will continue with what remains of the company post-acquisition, including possibly under the same name. “Uber isn’t likely to take the Luxe name as part of the deal,” according to the Journal’s source.

What Uber sees in Luxe’s engineering team isn’t clear, but given their recent purge of 20 Uber employees on sexual harassment grounds, it quite clearly has some vacancies to fill.

Luxe had raised $75.5 million over five rounds, making the deal potentially rather expensive for Uber, though it could be paying less given Luxe’s troubles. The company has a very long list of investors that include Foundation Capital, Google Inc.’s GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint, SV Angel and a number of individual investors such as Zynga Inc. co-founder Mark Pincus.

Image: Luxe