As AllChinaTech predicted earlier, Chinese bike sharing company Mobike has recently announced that it has landed USD 100 million in its Series C financing, as reported by Tencent Tech on Friday.
Tencent Tech said in the report that investors in this financing round included investment companies Sequoia Capital and Hillhouse Capital. Mobike’s earlier investors included Panda Capital and Sinovation Ventures.
On Monday, the largest ride-hailing platform in China Didi announced its investment of tens of millions of USD in ofo, Mobike’s main rival in China. ofo’s earlier investors included GSR Ventures, ZhenFund and Matrix Partners China.
So, it seems that Mobike has stood up to ofo as an equal in terms of capital support and investors’ popularity.
Mobike came online in April. The company designs and manufactures all of its 12,000 bikes, with a unit price estimated at RMB 3,000 (USD 449). There are no fixed parking bays for its bikes. The company charges one RMB for every 30 minutes of usage.
Ofo was founded in 2014. It focuses on university campus bike users. The unit price for the 70,000 ofo bikes is about RMB 300, significantly lower than that of a Mobike. Tech blog 36Kr said that ofo charges an average of RMB 0.5 each time per user.
It is still early to jump to conclusions, because more players have entered the game. On Tuesday, another bike sharing company, “Xiaoming Danche”, announced that it had grabbed tens of millions RMB of financing in its Angel round.
Who will win the bike battle is yet to be seen.
(Top photo from Commons.wikimedia.org)
