SoftBank, Mubadala in $4b round for China’s Didi Chuxing
Chinese ride-hailing app operator Didi Chuxing, which has received substantial PE and VC backing, has raised $4 billion in a new round of funding from investors including SoftBank Group and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala.
The round values Didi at $56 billion, according to a source familiar with the situation. It comes eight months after the company raised $5.5 billion at a valuation of about $50 billion. SoftBank contributed $5 billion of the total, while Silver Lake came in as a new investor and the likes of China Bank of Communications and China Merchants Bank re-upped.
The latest funding will go towards developing Didi's artificial intelligence (AI) technology, as well as international expansion and new business initiatives, including the development of new energy vehicles, a statement said.
The company opened an AI research laboratory, Didi Labs, in the US earlier this year, with a view to advancing cybersecurity analytics and refining intelligent driving technologies. The unit is led by Fengmin Gong, co-founder of US-based network and enterprise security company Palo Alto Networks.
On the electric vehicle front, Didi said last month that it will build its own charging networks for vehicles in China in partnership with the United Nations and the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization. Out of the two million electric vehicles in operation globally, over 260,000 are currently operating on Didi’s platform, the company said. It wants to increase that to one million by 2020.
Didi, which was created in 2015 through the merger of rivals Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, closed an even larger round of $7.3 billion in June of last year, comprising $4.5 billion in equity and $2.8 billion in debt. Two months after that, Didi acquired Uber’s China operation in a deal that valued the combined entity at $35 billion.
Didi claims to be the world’s largest mobile transportation platform, connecting over 450 million registered users with 21 million drivers in China. It offers a wide range of mobile-enabled mobility services, including taxi and private car-hailing, ride sharing and bus-booking, facilitating about 25 million rides every day.
Didi has sought to broaden its transportation ecosystem through investments in its counterparts in Southeast Asia, India, and the US, as well as backing domestic start-ups such as bike-sharing company Ofo and used-car trading platform Renrenche.
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