In what would clearly be the top contender when it comes to literal sky-rocketing of valuation in financial terms, Alibaba’s October’18 announced online services venture has already reached a $30 Billion valuation. This has come to light in a fresh Reuters report.
Alibaba’s combined online services entity has received somewhere close to $4 Billion in funds to function and accelerate growth. More than $3 billion of the new funds came from Alibaba itself and SoftBank’s (9984.T) Vision Fund, the report said. Primavera Capital Group and Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, which have already invested in Koubei, also joined in the fundraising, they said. The company expects to close this financing round by the end of November, one source added.
To put in some context to this, Alibaba in October this year, had announced merging the operation of food delivery service Ele.me and online restaurant guide business Koubei under a single management team. Both the companies either count Alibaba or one of the Chinese business giant’s affiliates as its lead investor.
Ele.me is a platform headquartered in Shanghai, offering food delivery services across most of urban China. In a deal in April where Alibaba bought the shares it did not already own, Ele.me was valued at $9.5 billion. Koubei on the other hand is a search engine of sorts which lets Chinese folks access information about anything and everything — restaurant listings, places to visit et al. The company was worth $8 billion at the end of last year, according to a list of unicorns published in March by a unit under China’s science and technology ministry. It has received $1.6Bn in investment till date, according to data available at Crunchbase.
