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Didi joins financing of Indian ride-hailing app Ola

Xinhua, September 28, 2015 Adjust font size:

Chinese ride-hailing app Didi announced on Monday that it has joined a group of investors in funding its Indian counterpart Ola, following its own financing of 3 billion U.S. dollars earlier this month.

The undisclosed amount of funding, which also includes money from GIC, Falcon Edge, Tiger Global and Softbank, came after Didi invested 100 million dollars in U.S. ride-sharing service Lyft earlier this month and joined a 350 million-dollar financing round for Grabtaxi, which is widely used in Southeast Asia.

Lyft and Grabtaxi are considered to be Uber's arch rivals in their respective regions.

Ola currently holds an 80-percent share of India's ride-hailing market, with 320,000 vehicles in more than 100 cities offering over 750,000 rides each day, Didi said in a statement.

Ola recently announced a 754 million-dollar expansion to boost its presence in India. An initial investment of 75 million dollars will be used to boost its driver numbers by 100,000 by the end of next year.

Didi now has the lion's share of China's online transportation services, accounting for 99 and 82 percent of the country's taxi-hailing and ride-on-demand services, respectively.

It has also expanded its offerings to customized shuttle services and carpooling amid growing competition with Uber and friction with domestic regulators over the legitimacy of its ride-on-demand services.

Didi CEO Cheng Wei said earlier this month that China's sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp. and Ping An Ventures joined its 3 billion-dollar placement, which put the value of the Chinese start-up at 16.5 billion dollars. Endi