Chinese bike sharing startup ofo on Wednesday announced its USD 450 million financing led by DST Global. Existing investors included Didi Chuxing, Coatue, and Matrix Partners China also participated in this round.
The latest funding turned out to be the largest ever by amount in the bike sharing sector, pushing ofo’s value ahead of other competitors, including Mobike.
“Ofo has a vision of being a globally influential company. We appreciate the trust from global top-notch investors. We’ll continue to lead the industry’s fast and healthy development and provide short-distance travel services to users around the world,” said Dai Wei, ofo’s founder and CEO.
DST, founded by tech tycoon Yuri Milner, has invested in a series of tech giants, including Facebook, Airbnb, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Didi Chuxing.
A sign that bike sharing is hot in China’s tech sector has been startups’ extremely fast financing. In October last year, ofo grabbed USD 130 million in Series C funding from Didi Chuxing, America-based Coatue, and Xiaomi.
Ofo, founded in 2014 inside the campus of Peking University, claimed that so far it has more than one million bikes and over 20 million registered users on its app, providing over 300 million rides. Worldwide, the startup has expanded to nearly 40 cities in China, the United States, Britain, and Singapore.
Its major rival, Shanghai-based Mobike, founded in 2015, in January stated that it has raised USD 215 million in Series D financing, led by Tencent and Warburg Pincus, followed by Sequoia Capital and Hillhouse Capital.
(Top photo from Ofo.so)