China's Dishangtie Car Rental raises $200m
Dishangtie Car Rental, a Shenzhen-based electric vehicle (EV) rental service, has raised a USD 200m Series D round across two tranches featuring CICC Capital.
The first tranche was led by CICC Shandong Green Development Fund, a joint venture established by CICC Capital and Shandong Development Investment Group last year. The second tranche was led by undisclosed international investors with participation from existing backer Ingka Holdings, a holding company for most of Ikea's stores.
Founded in 2015, Dishangtie, also known as DST Car Rental, provides intra-city freight support for 4,000 corporate customers through a network of more than 50,000 vehicles in 8,000 service stations across 200 cities. It operates or connects to 200,000 charging piles and has links to some 500 maintenance service providers.
Recent developments include a strategic collaboration with lithium-ion battery maker CATL and plans to launch EV logistics fleets with Singapore urban transport operator SMRT Group and Japan’s Itochu Corporation. The fresh capital will support industrial and digital buildouts, as well as expansion of the maintenance networks.
Dishangtie raised USD 100m for its Series C in May 2021, with Ingka taking the lead. The company has collaborated with Ikea since 2019 and accounts for one-third of the Swedish furniture retailer's distribution capacity in China.
About USD 170m was raised across four previous rounds from the likes of Itochu, Olympus Capital Holdings Asia, Jeneration Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and Eastern Bell Capital. Idinvest Partners became one of the company’s first international backers in 2019.
“When we were doing due diligence, we showed the datasets of how DST operates and its usage metrics to one of our LPs, and they said, ‘That can’t be real data,” Julien Mialaret, Asia lead for Idinvest, told AVCJ last year.
“When I speak to US investors about this model, they’re shocked because it doesn’t occur to them that a single start-up could take the whole vertical market. Everything they’ve seen in the US – things that look like DST – are just pure data companies.”
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