Taxi app Didi (or Didi Dache in Chinese) has finished the $100 million round of fundraising, with $60 million from Citic and $30 million from Tencent, as reported by Tencent’s online news site QQ.com (report in Chinese).
It’s also confirmed that the previous round Didi raised is $15 million and is from Tencent. Before that round the company received $3 million from GSR Ventures .
It is expected the funding will be used for grabbing market share. Recently Didi came up with a policy to subsidize taxi drivers with 10 yuan for each transaction or up to 100 yuan to encourage drivers who have turned down orders for twice or more times to accept orders.
Chinese investors were chasing taxi/car rental services in 2013. But now it’s pretty much a two-player game. Kuaidi, Didi’s direct competitor, is venture backed by Alibaba. Kuaidi reportedly would input RMB100 million (about $16 mn) to subsidize taxi drivers.
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