The cab wars in China, that saw companies like Uber and Didi Chuxing raise sums that would put the GDP of many of the smaller countries to shame, is now over. Didi Chuxing ended up buying Uber’s China operations and everyone went home happy. However, there is yet another war raging in the Chinese startup ecosystem and one of the players, MoBike, has announced a new round of funding led by Temasek.
Bikes, are the new turf for the battle between startups. China has a slew of services that let you rent GPS-enabled bikes in the city by using a mobile application. MoBike has emerged as one of the market leaders with a vast reach and copious amounts of funding.
MoBike had raised a massive, $215 million series D round led by Tencent in January. A couple of weeks later, another strategic investment from Foxconn followed. Well, the funding shows no sight of stopping and the company has now revealed yet another investment led by Singapore’s state-owned firm Temasek.
While the company refused to comment on the amount invested by the Singaporean firm, it did say that the total amount of funding raised by it this year, now exceeds $300 million. Some simple mathematics is enough to come up with the fact that Foxconn and Temasek have together contributed over $85 million to MoBike’s coffers.
The company also disclosed that it has now served over 10 million unique users, who have together completed, a massive 200 million+ paid rides using its platform. The numbers appear to point towards a fair customer retention rate, with each customer accounting for around 20 rides on an average. The company also said that it now has a presence n over 21 cities in China, including major ones like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Speaking about his company’s future plans, now that there are a lot of coins in the kitty, MoBike co-founder and CEO Davis Wang said:
In 2017, we will continue to invest in enhancing our technology, increasing our production capacity, recruiting top talent to our team, and in promoting Mobike’s innovative model internationally.
International expansion! And guess what is MoBike’s first destination outside China? Yup, Singapore.
