- A taxi driver looks for customers at the Bund area in Shanghai.
- Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Chinese taxi-hailing app Didi Dache, backed by Internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings, said Tuesday it has raised more than $700 million in its latest funding round.
The round was led by Singaporean state investment firm Temasek Holdings, DST Global, the Russian investment firm led by Yuri Milner, and Tencent, the taxi-hailing app said in a press release. The company called it the single biggest investment round in China’s mobile Internet sector.
Didi’s founder and Chief Executive Cheng Wei said the funding would go toward providing its services to more users, boosting research and development and improving its product offerings.
Didi Dache – loosely translated as Honk Honk, Catch a Cab – is one of mainly two dominant mobile apps in China that let users find and reserve taxis. Such apps have skyrocketed in popularity by responding to increasing demand from users who have found it difficult to catch cabs in many congested Chinese cities. Earlier this year, Didi secured a $100 million round of funding from investors that included Tencent.
Didi says it offers services in more than 300 Chinese cities and has more than 100 million registered users and 1 million registered taxi drivers.
Electronic taxi hailing has been one of the battlegrounds on which Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent have fought, with both giants seeing such apps as drivers of growth and ways to expand the services they can offer their users. Alibaba backs another taxi booking app called Kuaidi Dache. Both ride-fetching companies boast completing millions of daily rides. Uber, the San Francisco car hailing app, also operates in a number of major Chinese cities.
The Chinese apps allow users to bid for cabs by entering their location and destination and, if they want to, offering to pay an additional tip to drivers. The service comes at the expense of dispatch services run by the cab companies and essentially allows users to get around local government limits on taxi fares.
But the taxi-hailing apps continue to face some uncertainty over their operations as local government offices and China’s Ministry of Transport have made moves to standardize and regulate the rapidly growing business.
______________________________________________________
For the latest news and analysis, follow @wsjd.
And like us on Facebook to get our news right in your feed:
Get breaking news and personal-tech reviews delivered right to your inbox.
More from WSJ.D: And make sure to visit WSJ.D for all of our news, personal tech coverage, analysis and more, and add our XML feed to your favorite reader.
