China’s top ridesharing company, Didi Chuxing, has raised $4 billion in new capital as it aims to begin the next phase of its corporate life. This latest round adds to the $13 billion from investors, including Alibaba, Tencent and Apple, among others. The main focus of the latest funding, according to the firm, will be expanding the company footprint globally, further developing their electric vehicle initiative and investing more aggressively in artificial intelligence (AI) tech.
The latest investors in the round are, as of yet, unknown. Didi Chuxing has only noted, in a brief release on the round, that it was a global team effort: “Chinese and international institutions joined the latest fundraising round.”
The takeaway is that previous investors threw more money in, but numerous firms have invested in the ridesharing company, which makes it hard to narrow things down. There is news from anonymous sources that previous investors SoftBank and Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Capital helped out this time.
The latest infusion of funding jumps Didi Chuxing’s value to $56 billion — up from $50 billion in April. That might be enough to put Didi ahead of Uber in the race to be the most valuable ridesharing firm on Earth, depending on the outcome of Uber’s ongoing funding round. Uber is presently valued between $68 billion and $70 billion, but a recent investment from SoftBank came at a reported discount of 30 percent.
Didi is China’s ride-hailing leader by some margin, courtesy of its acquisition of Uber’s Chinese business. That deal was announced more than a year ago but is still pending full approval before its completion.
As of today, Didi is China’s only ridesharing firm, as services go, though it has invested in Uber rivals all over the world, including Lyft, Taxify, Careem and Ola in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and India respectively. The widely held belief is that physical expansion is soon to follow, but where it might start remains very much up in the air.
Didi was linked with an expansion to Mexico, and Bloomberg has been reporting that it is considering Taiwan to test out a “franchise model.”