Yahoo News 
Chinese startup Ofo raises $700 million as bike-sharing race heats up
BI Intelligence
This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.
Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo raised $700 million in a Series E funding round and was seeking a valuation of about $3 billion, reports Bloomberg.
The new funding round was led by Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding and included an investment from Didi Chuxing, which had participating in earlier rounds.
Ofo’s newest funding comes a few weeks after its biggest competitor, Mobike, announced it had raised $600 million. Mobike’s funding was led by Tencent, the Chinese internet company that competes with Alibaba on a number of fronts. Ofo and Mobike's competition to dominate the bike-sharing market is also a proxy war over a growing, vital space in markets including Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Western Europe.
Bike-sharing is an important part of the transportation ecosystem in much of the world:
Though ride-sharing companies like Uber, Lyft, and Didi Chuxing have brought in more investment, bicycles are in many ways more critical to how people move around. Lyft announced recently that it had surpassed 1 million rides per day, while Uber averages around 5.5 million daily riders. Both pale in comparison to Mobike, which at peak times can reach 25 million trips per day, while Ofo can reach as many as 10 milliondaily rides.
Bikes are a primary means of transport in much of APAC and Western Europe. Cars are often too expensive for consumers in APAC, while they are expensive to maintain and often inconvenient in many parts of Western Europe. In Denmark, for instance, 90% of the population own bikes, and in the Netherlands 63% of people ride bikes daily.
Bike-sharing services allow consumers increased flexibility. Ofo and Mobike both utilize hubless bike-sharing services, where the bicycle features a built-in connected lock that can be unlocked when a user requests the bike, then locks when the ride is over and communicates its location back to the service.
Using bike sharing, consumers can get rides when they need but not need to deal with storage and maintenance, since they aren’t tied to the bike that they own. So if someone wants to bike to an event, they don’t need to bike home after, letting them use a ride-hailing service. This flexibility is a key advantage for companies like Ofo and Mobike as they eye global expansion given the influx of new funds.
BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has conducted an exclusive study with in-depth research into the field and created a detailed report on the IoT that:
Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystem
Offers forecasts for the IoT moving forward and highlights areas of interest in the coming years
Looks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and why
Highlights drivers and challenges facing companies implementing IoT solutions
To get the full report, subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND more than 250 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> Learn More Now
You can also purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store.
See Also:
