Taxi app Didi Dache (or Didi in short) reportedly is raising a Series C round of funding that will be up to $100 million. Investors include Citic and Tencent (report in Chinese).
Tencent has already contributed an estimated $15 million to the company in the last round. No wonder it has been integrated into Tencent’s products like the latest version of Tencent Maps. WeChat users have been able to book taxis through Didi’s Official WeChat account. WeChat Payment will be available for Didi users next month, as reported.
Didi has stood out from a crowd of taxi apps in China thanks to the backing from investors especially Tencent. Didi’s major competitor now is Kuaidi who is venture backed by Alibaba. Likewise, Kuaidi users can make payments with Alipay, the digital payment service of Alibaba Group. Kuaidi announced to acquire the fourth largest taxi app Dahuangfeng in China last month, saying Alibaba would inject more funding into it.
Although Chinese local governments like Beijing stepped in to ban taxi apps or some features, taxi apps have been widely adopted by drivers and users in bigger cities. It is expected that the funding those apps receive will be used for expanding to smaller cities in or even outside of mainland China. Dahuangfeng, now a Kuaidi company, disclosed last week that they had had 200-300 taxis on board in Hong Kong and their next target markets are Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
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