Ola-Didi Kuaidi to take on Uber together

Didi Kuaidi, China's largest taxi aggregator app, which is backed by internet behemoth Alibaba, would soon invest in homegrown Ola, thus making the Uber vs Ola battle bloodier than before.

Didi's investment in Bangalore-headquartered Ola comes close on the heels of it picking up stakes in San Francisco-based Lyft and Malaysia's GrabTaxi, signalling a global alliance against the cashrich Uber.

People close to the development told TOI that Ola, formerly Olacabs, is finalizing the second tranche of $200 million of its $500 million financing round led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, Didi Kuaidi, and Baillie Gifford, a Scottish investment firm which is a shareholder in Flipkart, valuing the Indian cab-hailing app at $5 billion.

GIC, which put in a small amount when Ola scored $400 million led by DST Global earlier this year, is expected to pump as much as $100 million this time around while Didi mayinvest around $30 million. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global is also likely to participate in the latest round, sources said. TOI had reported first, in its August 10 edition, about New York-based hedge fund FalconEdge, Softbank Corp and Tiger Global putting the first chunk of $300 million into Ola. Separate email queries sent by TOI regarding the financing round to Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder & CEO of Ola, Didi Kuaidi and GIC did not elicit a response till the time of going to press. A spokesperson for Baillie Gifford said, "I am afraid that on this occasion we will not be able to offer any comment."

"There's a lot of interest in this round and it may even get oversubscribed. As of now it's likely to close at $500 million.Things are still to be worked out fully," said a person privy to the matter. Even as Ola builds a bigger war chest, there has been talk of the Travis Ka lanick-led Uber looking to raise $1billion for India separately, just like it racked up $1.2 billion for China recently , two markets which are of enormous significance for the company . Uber, the most-valued tech startup worldwide at $51billion, also became the youngest privately-held company to cross the $50 billion valuation mark, beating Facebook's record in July this year.

Despite being buffeted by regulatory hurdles, both Ola and Uber have been aggressively rolling out new services, discounting, announcing millions in investments along with introducing driver initiatives as competition to corner market share intensifies in Asia's third largest economy which has seen smartpho ne usage grow exponentially .The five-year-old Ola, which came to life in Mumbai, presently leads the domestic taxi app market and claims to be doing as many as 750,000 rides a day while Uber, while announcing its $1 billion investment plan for India, said that it aims to touch 1million rides over the next 9 months from the present 200,000. Ola's pole position got cemented earlier this year when it acquired its smaller rival TaxiForSure . A month before Ola acqui red TFS in India, China's largest taxi-hailing app Didi Dache merged with its closest competitor Kuaidi Dache, backed by internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings and in vestors like Alibaba, SoftBank and Tiger Global, to form a $6-billion transportation powerhouse. Didi Kuaidi is valued at $16 billion and is Uber's biggest competitor worldwide, having raised $4.4 billion in investor money. The Chinese taxi app has been aligning all of Uber's rivals to fight the startup which is spread across 300 cities globally.

(Image credits: Indiatimes)