Didi Kuaidi invests in Indian ride-hailing app Ola

Chinese ride-hailing app Didi has joined investors in funding Ola app, following its own financing of $3 billion earlier this month, the company said on Monday.

In comparison, Uber plans to average more than 1 million rides a day in India over the next few months as it steps up investments to take on Ola.

Also investing in Ola’s new round are SoftBank, Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, Tiger Global, and Falcon Edge. A spokesman for Didi declined to specify the size of the investment.

Right now, though, perhaps its fiercest competition is coming from Chinese ride-hailing rival Didi Kuaidi, with each company taking bold measures in its attempt to dominate.

Didi Kuaidi recently said it had invested in another ride-hailing company, Malaysia-based GrabTaxi.

Uber’s three most popular cities are all in China, but leaked financial documents indicate that the company is spending a lot more money than it is recouping on each ride.

“Didi Kuaidi believes both India and China are rapidly developing countries with enormous market potentials”, the company said in a statement. The amount of investment has been left undisclosed. An initial investment of $75 million will be used to boost its driver numbers by 100,000 by the end of next year. “We look forward to exchange learnings from two of the world’s largest markets and the tremendous synergies this partnership can bring, towards our commitment of building mobility for a billions of Indians”. This is in addition to an allocation of US$50 million for its soon-to-be launched shuttle service.

Editor’s Note: Marbridge Consulting contacted National Business Daily and Didi Chuxing, but neither was available to confirm whether the 80% market share mentioned above refers to the taxi market only or all auto hire services, or whether the market share figure is based on requests, trips, users, or a few other metric. Now the service has over 100,000 drivers, a number that has grown from 10,000 a year ago.