New funding makes China's Didi 'most valuable Asian start-up'

by Fredrick Graves April 30, 2017, 1:34

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 New funding makes China's Didi 'most valuable Asian start-up'

The people said that part of the latest capital investment in Didi would be used for global expansion.

People familiar with the matter said the new round is likely to give the auto hailing site a valuation of over US$50 billion, making it the world's most valuable start-up, after Uber.

The investors include SoftBank, Silver Lake Partners, Bank of Communications and China Merchants Bank. Didi amassed US$10 billion in cash and equivalents previous year, but the deal yields more ammunition as it prepares to challenge Uber and Alphabet Inc.in automated driving, and buys the company time to carve out new revenue streams.

This makes it on of the largest private technology companies behind Uber which is worth around $66 billion and Alibaba's payment affiliate Ant Financial, which is worth $60 billion.

Google now lets hardware developers tinker with its Assistant
If you need a little inspiration for what to create with the Google Assistant SDK , just check out Deeplocal's mocktails mixer . Once the user is ready to cook, they will have to use the command "Ok Google, start cooking" or "Ok Google, start recipe".

Didi Chuxing, China's top ride-hailing firm, is set to raise up to $6 billion with a fresh injection of capital from investors including Softbank Group Corp, valuing the company at over $50 billion, sources said. Didi has sealed several overseas partnerships, focusing on intelligent driving, such as making use of artificial intelligence, as well as similar ride-hailing services.

Last year, Didi had succeeded in buying US-based Ubers operations in China, helping the company gain further market share.

Earlier this year, Didi launched a laboratory in Mountain View in California, close to an Apple research facility, in an effort to attract the best talent in AI.

Cheng and President Jean Liu hope that adopting driverless technology will help overcome such hurdles in the future. The company, in a statement told TechCrunch that the investment would be used for continuing the company's global expansion and exploration of new technology such as artificial intelligence in its transportation setup. Didi wants to take advantage of data on 300 million users across some 400 cities.

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