Tag: india

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India’s budget hotel network unicorn OYO expands into China

The tech world sees plenty of Chinese companies move into India — including the likes of Alibaba and Xiaomi — but few expand the other way. OYO Rooms, the billion-dollar Indian startup that pioneered budget hotel networks, is looking to buck the trend, however, after it launched operations in China.

Today the company officially announced its arrival in China, where it says it covers 11,000 (exclusive) rooms across 26 cities, including Hangzhou, Xian, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Xiamen and Kunming. That selection includes a combination of franchises and managed hotels. OYO is initially launching its ‘hotels’ product, and it isn’t saying whether others — which include ‘rooms’ and ‘townhouses’ — will also expand to China.

Interestingly, an OYO representative confirmed that this expansion wasn’t conducted in partnership with China Lodgings, the Nasdaq-listed hotel firm that invested $10 million in the startup last year. OYO said China Lodgings is assisting with the overall strategy in China, however. Make of that what you will.

OYO — which stands for On Your Own — was founded in 2013 by then-teenager Ritesh Agarwal, a Thiel Fellow who got the idea for the business after a stint backpacking across India staying budget hotels. The service helps bring the long-tail of small hotels online to generate bookings whilst also ensuring (often absent) minimum standards for travelers, such as hot water, clean towels and linen and Wi-Fi.

The company counts SoftBank among its backers and it has raised over $450 million in capital to date, including a $250 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund last year.

OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal [image via OYO, Facebook]

OYO claims over 100,000 rooms in Inda, and it has been busy investigating new growth opportunities. The China launch is the third overseas foray from OYO, coming after expansions to Nepal and Malaysia. Given the size of the Chinese market and strong competition, this is a daunting challenge for OYO.

Just ask Airbnb .

While the two don’t compete directly on product, they target a similar consumer bracket — consumers seeking an alternative to conventional hotels and lodgings. In China, Airbnb’s big rival is Tujia, which is valued at $1.5 billion and pushing the U.S. company hard. Tujia and Airbnb were one final signature away from calling off their war and merging, Bloomberg recently reported, but ultimately Airbnb opted to go it alone in China. Tujia is determined to battle it so hard that it returns to the negotiation table.

So, how then, will OYO — which is well-funded but lacking the capitalization and experience of Airbnb — navigate the Chinese market? Time will tell but you’d suspect it will need to call on some local allies if it is to make an impact.

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Truecaller makes first acquisition to build out payment and financial services in India

Sweden’s Truecaller started out life as a service that screens calls and messages to weed out spammers. In recent times the company has switched its focus to India, its largest market based on users, adding services that include payments to make it more useful. Now Truecaller is putting even more weight behind its India push after it announced its first acquisition, mobile payment service Chillr.

The vision is to go deeper into mobile payments and associated services to turn Truecaller into a utility that goes beyond just handling messages and calls, particularly payments — a space that WhatsApp is preparing to enter in India.

Truecaller doesn’t have WhatsApp -like scale — few companies can match 200 million active users in Indua, but it did recently disclose that it has 100 million daily active users worldwide, while India is its largest country with 150 million registered users.

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase. TechCrunch reported in 2015 that it was in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of around $1 billion, but a deal never happened. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith. Chillr, which offer payment services between over 50 banks, had raised $7.5 million from the likes of Blume Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Truecaller isn’t disclosing how much it has paid for the deal, but it said that Chillr’s entire team of 45 people will move over and the Chillr service will be phased out. In addition, Chillr CEO Sony Joy will become vice president of Truecaller Pay, running that India-based payment business which will inherit Chillr’s core features.

“We’ve acquired a company that is known for innovation and leading this space in terms of building a fantastic product,” Truecaller co-founder and CSO Nami Zarringhalam told TechCrunch in an interview.

Zarringhalam said the Truecaller team met with Chillr as part of an effort to reach out to partners to build out an ecosystem of third-party services, but quickly realized there was potential to come together.

“We realized we shared synergies in thought processes for caring for the customer and user experience,” he added, explaining that Joy and his Chillr team will “take over the vision of execution of Truecaller Pay.”

Truecaller added payments in India last year

Joy told TechCrunch that he envisages developing Truecaller Pay into one of India’s top three payment apps over the next two years.

Already, the service supports peer-to-peer payments following a partnership with ICICI Bank, but there are plans to layer on additional services from third parties. That could include integrations to provide services such as loans, financing, micro-insurance and more.

Joy pointed out that India’s banking push has seen many people in the country sign up for at least one account, so now the challenge is not necessarily getting banked but instead getting access to the right services. Thanks to gathering information through payments and other customer data, Truecaller could, with permission from users, share data with financial services companies to give users access to services that wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.

“Most citizens have a bank account (in each household), now being underserved is more to do with access to other services,” he explained.

Joy added that Truecaller is aiming to layer in value-added services over its SMS capabilities, digging into the fact that SMS remains a key communication and information channel in India. For example, helping users pay for items confirmed via SMS, or pay for an order which is tracked via SMS.

The development of the service in India has made it look from the outside that the company is splitting into two, a product localized for India and another for the rest of the world. However, Zarringhalam said that the company plans to replicate its approach — payments and more — in other markets.

“It could be based on acquisitions or partners, time will tell,” he said. “But our plan is to develop this for all markers where our market penetration is high and the market dynamics are right.”

Truecaller has raised over $90 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase. TechCrunch reported in 2015 that it was in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of around $1 billion, but a deal never happened. Truecaller has instead raised capital from Swedish investment firm Zenith.

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CapitalG leads $21.5M investment in Aye Finance, its first deal in India

India is a major part of Google’s global focus. The company launched a new product in India last week as its program to bring free WiFi to the public registered its 400th railway station. Now, the U.S. tech giant is continuing to deepen its focus after CapitalG — its venture arm formerly known as Google Capital — made its first investment in India by backing micro-loan startup Aye Finance.

CapitalG led the $21.5 million Series C round which also included participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and LGT, who were part of a $10.5 million investment in 2016. Since that round, Aye Finance has raised over $30 million via a series of debt investment-based deals, according to data from Crunchbase.

Aye Finance offers micro-loans to small businesses in India that are not on the radar of banks and traditional financing companies, and also don’t qualify for programs run by the likes of Flipkart and Amazon. The firm aims to digitize the market of informal money lending and loan sharking. Its disbursements are typically used as working capital for SMEs.

Over its four years of operations, the startup claims it has payed out more than 60,000 loans. Today, it claims to cover 10 states in India through a network of 72 branches. The firm touts its use of technology, and in particular data, which helps keep operating costs low and efficiency high.

In particular, it targets industry ‘clusters’ — aka industry verticals — which allows it not only to develop more accurate metrics for analyzing the potential of a business than the general criteria that traditional financiers follow, but it also helps generate new leads through word of mouth.

Aye Finance raises $10.3M to supply micro-loans to small companies in India

“We have used insightful data models and technology to provide affordable business loans to the financially excluded micro enterprises across India [and] CapitalG’s access to Google expertise in scaling businesses using analytics and technology will strongly supplement our approach. We are at an exciting juncture, where the business model has been proven and is also scaling well,” Sanjay Sharma, Aye Finance founder and managing director, said in a statement.

Google’s previously made its first direct investment in an Indian startup when it backed Dunzo, a startup that operates a concierge app, in December 2017. Now CapitalG is catching up with its first deal on Indian soil.

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Alibaba’s Ant Financial fintech affiliate raises $14 billion to continue its global expansion

Ant Financial, the financial services affiliate connected to Alibaba which operates the Alipay mobile payment service, has confirmed that it has closed a Series C funding round that totals an enormous $14 billion.

The rumors have been flying about this huge financing deal for the past month or so, with multiple publications reporting that Ant — which has been strongly linked with an IPO — was in the market to raise at least $9 billion at a valuation of upwards of $100 billion. That turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg here.

The money comes via a tranche of U.S. dollar financing and Chinese RMB from local investors. Those names include Singapore-based sovereign funds GIC and Temasek, Malaysian sovereign fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Warburg Pincus, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Silver Lake and General Atlantic.

Ant said that the money will go towards extending its global expansion (and deepening its presence in non-China markets it has already entered), developing technology and hiring.

“We are pleased to welcome these investors as partners, who share our vision and mission, to embark on our journey to further promote inclusive finance globally and bring equal opportunities to the world. We are proud of, and inspired by, the transformation we have affected in the lives of ordinary people and small businesses over the past 14 years,” Ant Financial CEO and executive chairman Eric Jing said in a statement.

Alibaba itself doesn’t invest in Ant, which it span off shortly before its mega-IPO in the U.S. in 2014, but the company did recently take up an option to own 33 percent of Ant’s shares.

Ant has long been tipped to go public. Back in 2016 when it raised a then blockbuster $4.5 billion — little did we know it would pull in many multiples more — the company has been reportedly considering a public listing, but it instead opted to raise new capital at a valuation of $60 billion.

It looks like the same again, but with higher stakes. This new Series C round pushes that valuation up to $100 billion, according to Bloomberg. (Ant didn’t comment on its valuation.) So what has Ant done over the past two years to justify that jump?

It has long been a key fintech company in China, where it claims to serve offer 500 million consumers and offers Alipay, digital banking and investment services, but it has begun to replicate that business overseas in recent years. In particular, it has made investments and set up joint-ventures and new businesses in a slew of Asian countries that include India, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The company was, however, unsuccessful in its effort to buy MoneyGram after the U.S. government blocked the $1.2 billion deal.

On the business-side, Ant is said to have posted a $1.4 billion profit over the last year, suggesting it is more than ready to make the leap to being a public firm.

Despite that U.S. deal setback, Ant said today that its global footprint extends to 870 million consumers. I’d take that with a pinch of salt at this point since its business outside of China is in its early stages, but there seems little doubt that it is on the road to replicating its scale in its homeland in many parts of Asia. Raising this huge round only solidifies those plans by providing the kind of capital infusion that tops most of the world’s IPOs in one fell swoop.

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Google says over 8 million people use its free WiFi service at railway stations in India

Back in 2015, Google launched an initiative to bring free WiFi to India’s railway stations and today the U.S. tech giant announced that the program has passed its target of reaching 400 stations, attracting a base of eight million users in the process.

The milestone was hit today when Dibrugarh station in northeastern state Assam went online.

Google gave some insight into the scale of the program’s reach when it revealed that over eight million people use the railway-based WiFi each month. On average, the firm said, users consume 350MB in data per session with half going online via the WiFi program at least twice per day.

In another sign of scale, Google began to monetize the initiative earlier this year by offering high-speed connections for a price. The standard option includes ads to develop revenue for Google and its partners, which include Indian Railways and RailTel.

Reaching million users and over 400 stations is hugely impressive but Google said that its journey “remains unfinished.” Beyond connecting stations, the firm wants to add free WiFi to other connection points across India.

“India has the second largest population of internet users in the world, but there are still almost a billion Indians who aren’t online. There are millions of other life-changing journeys that still haven’t been taken. We realize that not everyone in India lives or works near a train station,” Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion team, wrote in a blog post.

The program is also taking roots overseas. Google has already expanded it to Indonesia and Mexico and Sengupta said that it will make its way to “even more countries soon.”

Google isn’t the only tech giant pioneering a free Wi-Fi model. Facebook’s successor to Internet.org — the program that was banned in India for violating net neutrality regulations — launched in India last year. The company hasn’t said much about it, but it isn’t likely to have anything like the same scale as Google’s.

Free Wi-Fi isn’t the only India-specific strategy from Google. The U.S. firm has launched a series of local services in India, including data-friendly versions of its top apps, a mobile payment network called Tez, a food delivery service and — most recently — a social network for local communities.

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“Social selling” startup Meesho lands $11.5M Series B led by Sequoia India

Y Combinator alum Meesho, one of several “social selling” startups gaining speed in India, will add more features to its e-commerce platform after closing a $11.5 million Series B led by Sequoia India. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Y Combinator and Venture Highway also returned for the round, which brings the Bangalore-based startup’s total funding so far to $15 million. Its last round of funding, a $3.4 million Series A, was announced last October.

Like social selling competitors including GlowRoad and Zepo, Meesho’s model combines dropshipping from its wholesale partners with a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools and services. This reduces overhead while making it easy for sellers, who Meesho says includes many housewives, students and retirees, to set up an online business through WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media.

Meesho’s tools include an online platform that allows sellers to manage purchases and process payments, as well as a network of wholesale suppliers (its main categories are currently fashion and lifestyle items) and logistics providers. In other words, it offers almost everything its vendors need to start selling online. This leaves vendors responsible for customer acquisition, picking what items they want to include in their online shops and marketing them.

This reselling model appeals to small stores, as well as individuals, who want to make more money but don’t want the expense of setting up an e-commerce business from scratch and carrying inventory. Meesho’s rivals include e-commerce startups like GlowRoad, Shopmatic and Zepo, which have also recently raised large funding rounds. All of these companies attract sellers by offering a significant amount of help with order management, payment processing, fulfillment and logistics.

In order to differentiate, chief executive officer Vidit Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho in 2015 with Sanjeev Barnwal, its chief technology officer, tells TechCrunch it focuses on product quality, pricing and personalization to help resellers improve their sales and customer service. Meesho claims that more than 800,000 resellers have used its platform and that a “typical” reseller earns between 20,000 to 25,000 rupees per month (about $298 to $373).

In a press statement about the funding, Sequoia India managing director Mohit Bhatnagar said “Social commerce is the future of e-commerce in India. People buy from people they trust, and that’s what Meesho enables.  Entrepreneurs, many of them women, use the Meesho platform to recommend, customize and sell to their family and friends. Social selling is a huge trend and Sequoia India is excited to partner with Meesho, which is the early leader in this space.”

Aatrey says Meesho’s Series B capital will be used to hire more people for its tech and product teams in order to build a suite of new customer acquisition and selling tools. The startup also plans to add more personalization options for its resellers and product categories.

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India’s Locus raises $4M to expand its logistics management service worldwide

Locus, a three-year-old startup that helps companies map out their logistics, has pulled in $4 million in funding to grow its global footprint outside of its native India.

The round is described as pre-Series B and it was provided by Rocketship.vc, Recruit Strategic Partners, pi Ventures and DSP Group’s Hemendra Kothari. Existing backers Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, BeeNext and growX ventures also took part. Bengaluru-based Locus previously raised a $2.75 million Series A in 2016.

The company was founded in 2015 by Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, two ex Amazon engineers who met when working on machine learning for AWS. Initially the duo developed a safety app that mapped out optimal routes to let a ride-hailing customer sense if their driver was going rogue and not sticking to the designated trip, but it later pivoted into logistics tracking after feedback from enterprise users.

Today, Locus is focused on helping customers optimize the operational side of their logistics, whether that is moving people, goods or more at scale. It doesn’t cover ride-hailing and it isn’t necessarily focused on ensuring the faster route. Instead, it tackles complex challenges such as helping FCMGs optimize travel for their management — the key focus being on spending as much time in stores for meetings — or helping organizations move large orders by figuring out how many trucks are needed, which routes are optimal, etc.

Co-founder and CEO Rastogi described the role as that of “chief supply chain officer.”

“We want to automate all human decisions around logistics,” he explained to TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the business makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to suss out routes and operational approaches.

He added that the machine-based approach can trump human logic in some cases, thanks to the sheer amounts of data it is based on. In one example, he explained how the Locus system had advised trucks taking a long haul trip to return to the client HQ using a different route. Initially the team figured there was a problem, but on closer inspection they found that the return route cut out a steep hill which, while fine to travel down on the outbound led, was best avoided on the return trip.

That decision, Rastogi said, was based on travel data that the system had observed and might not ordinarily have been made by human-based analysts. To help with the system, the company also provides a $500-priced scanner — “SizeUp,” pictured below — for measuring packages. The idea is to not only make the tech portable but affordable enough that it can be used companies of all sizes.

The company began to expand to overseas markets this year with moves into North America — both Canada and the U.S. — and Southeast Asia. Rastogi said the new capital will go towards expanding its presence in those markets. Later this year, he said, Locus plans to raise a “significant” Series B round, among the objectives for that is a dedicated technical team in Tel Aviv to complement the work happening in India.

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PayPal and Singapore’s Temasek invest $125M in Indian payment startup Pine Labs

Fresh from agreeing its largest acquisition to date with a deal to buy European payment firm iZettle for $2.2 billion, PayPal is on the investment hunt once again after it backed India’s Pine Labs with a $125 million round.

The financing jointly comes from PayPal and Temasek, the sovereign investment fund from the Singaporean government with over $200 billion in assets. Both will take undisclosed “minority shares” in Pine Labs. Sequoia made a seed investment in 2009 and it remains the startup’s largest-single investor, the VC firm said.

The new deal takes New Delhi-based Pine Labs to $208 million raised from investors to date. It previously closed an $82 million investment from PE funds Actis and Altimeter Capital in March of this year at a reported valuation of $900 million. Recent reports speculated on the Temasek investment (but not PayPal) which would give Pine Labs a valuation of over $1 billion, thus vaulting it into the global ‘unicorn’ club. A spokesperson declined to give a confirmed valuation for the latest deal.

Like iZettle, Pine Labs offers a point-of-sale device that covers debit and credit cards, as well as new and increasingly popular digital payment methods that include mobile wallets, and services that support Indian government project UPI. Rather than other traditional POS devices that are common across India, Pine Labs’ is smart and cloud-based.

While that product gives it distribution, the company offers a suite of services for retailers and SMEs which include customer analytics, a transaction dashboard, and loan services. The company’s notable public-facing clients include retailer Croma, Nike, McDonald’s, Apple, KFC, Sony and Samsung.

Since that last investment in March, there’s been a change at the top. Pine Labs appointed board member Vicky Bindra, a former executive with Visa, MasterCard and GE Capital, as its CEO in April to go after international expansion and new services for consumers and banks. That’s also how this new capital will be spent, the company confirmed in an announcement.

In a statement, Bindra said Pine Lab’s annualized transaction volume is $15 billion through a base of around 300,000 payment points. He added that the business is “on track to originate over $1 billion USD of instant loans at point-of-sale terminals for card issuers and partner NBFCs this fiscal year.”

“We’re teaming up with Temasekand PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point. We are a leader in the offline payments space, a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products. The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem,” Pine Labs founder Lokvir Kapoor added via a statement.

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Google launches a Q&A app for neighborhood communities in India

Google is increasing its focus on India after it released a new social app that’s aimed at building neighborhood communities within cities in the country.

The company’s ‘Next Billion’ team in charge of emerging markets has dedicated significant resources to India. Its initiatives include data-friendly versions of YouTube and other popular services, its Tez mobile payment app, a food delivery service and a national WiFi network initiative. Now it is adding one more to the list with the release of Neighbourly, a Q&A app for sharing local knowledge.

The basic goal is to give local communities an outlet to seek answers to practical questions about local life, routine and more. Google believes that an increase in urban migration, short-term leasing and busy lives has changed the dynamic of local communities and made it harder to share information quite so easily.

“Life happens close to home, in order the of a 1-2km radius, and local questions come up all the time. But as cities get bigger and bigger, we’re finding that these local questions are getting hard to use — word of mouth used to be key,” Josh Woodward, a product manager within the Next Billion initiative, explained to TechCrunch.

“We built neighborly as a way to connect you with your neighborhood, ask questions, share expertise and stay up to date in a safe way,” he added.

This idea is nothing new, of course. Already in India, WhatsApp — which counts 200 million users in the country — has a range of community groups, but the big issue is discovery since new users have to be added to the group directly.

The new Google app is much like Jelly, the question and answer service from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone that was ultimately bought by Pinterest, but with localized tweaks. A beta version of the app is initially available in Mumbai, but users located in other areas can join a waitlist pending expansion.

Questions and answers are handled via swipeable cards — who knew Tinder’s design would reach neighborhood community apps in India — while the app uses GPS to add a user into their neighborhood right from sign-up.

Woodward said Google is employing ranking and personalization technology which, over time, will match users with the kind of questions they can answer or have shown an interest in. For now, the service is app-based with a read-only mobile web version.

Google’s local tweaks to make the app easy to use include voice-based entry for questions, which covers a range of India’s non-English languages, and a series of prompts that pop up when a user decides to post a question to help them start.

The company has looked at safety issues, and made it easy to flag content which is unsuitable. Once flagged, Woodward confirmed the content is passed to a local content moderator who asses whether it is “neighborly.”

In terms of safety, users sign up using a first name only, there is no private messaging or phone number requirement, and individual profile photos cannot be copied via screenshot and don’t expand when clicked to prevent being stolen. That taps into concern women have about their photos being abused, an issue that Facebook has taken measures against in India, too.

In fact, at sign-up, Google asks users to agree to a ‘contract’ — “I will respect my neighbors” — before letting them into the app. But still, you’d imagine that the laws of the internet will mean that some people will misuse the service.

Profile pages do, however, display badges earned by answering questions — both an incentive and a display of trust, according to Woodward — while users can follow, and be followed, to keep with certain users and their content.

Google tested the app on thousands of users over a period of about a month to get the mechanics right. Woodward said that 30-50 percent of questions were answered within five minutes, which bodes well but discovery looks like being the key issue. That was ultimately the downfall of Jelly, albeit that both apps serve very different audiences and purposes.

Further down the line, Woodward said that Google could add business accounts and integrate other Google services into Neighbourly, but for now the sink-or-swim challenge is to make an impact.

The launch of Neighbourly comes the same day that Google launched Files Go in China. In doing so, the search giant gave a glimpse at its new strategy for China, which involves opportunistic product launches, relationships and strategic investments.

Google is quietly formulating a new strategy for China

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Uber’s European rival Taxify raises $175M led by Daimler at a $1B valuation

There’s a new unicorn in the global ride-hailing space after Taxify, a startup born in Estonia that does battle with Uber across Europe and Africa, closed $175 million in new funding that takes it valuation to the $1 billion mark.

Daimler, the German automotive giant which owns Mercedes-Benz among other things, led the round. The investment also featured participation from new backers Europe-based Korelya Capital and Taavet Hinrikus, founder of billion-dollar Estonian fintech startup Transferwise. Taxify said that China’s Didi Chuxing was among the returning investors to join.

The company said it plans to deploy the capital to develop its technology and make further expansions in Europe and Asia.

Beyond its automotive business, Daimler has taken a role in ride-hailing already. Its investments in the space include the acquisition of car-sharing business car2Go and German car-pooling startup Flinc, while it has put money into Europe-based car-pooling company Via and Turo, another car-sharing service which took on Daimler’s rival service Croove. More widely, Daimler and BMW consolidated their mobility businesses — which include parking apps, charging solutions, ride-hailing and more — in a consolidation move made in March of this year. Now, added to that, Daimler will take a seat on the Taxify board.

Given its extensive interest in mobility, it makes sense that Daimler is backing Taxify, which has emerged as the main contender battling Uber in Europe and Africa, while it has also forayed into Australia, too. Surprisingly, the round is the first major fundraising moment for Taxify, which had raised just €2 million ($2.4 million) prior to Didi’s undisclosed investment last year.

“We’re on a mission to build the future of mobility, and it’s great to have the support of investors like Daimler and Didi,” said CEO and co-founder Markus Villig in a statement. “This is just the beginning as more and more people give up on car ownership and opt for on-demand transportation.”

The ride-sharing space has homogenized somewhat in recent years with most companies offer the same services, so against that backdrop Taxify has something of a unique story. The startup was founded in Estonia in 2013 — the home of tech giant Skype — but brothers Markus Villig, then 19 years old, and his brother Martin, who had worked for Skype.

Villig junior is now just 24 years old which makes him one of the youngest heads of a billion-dollar company in the world, although OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal is slightly younger and led a unicorn at an even younger age. Still, it’s quite an achievement.

His original vision was to build a service for his native Estonia using money borrowed from his parents, but that vision expanded and the service is now present in over 25 countries, predominantly in Europe and Africa. Markus Villig said today that the company has more than 100,000 drivers and over 10 million users, a big jump on the 2.5 million users it claimed back in August. Villig added that Taxify’s ride volumes grew ten-fold last year, although he did not provide a raw figure.

Taxify CEO and co-founder Markus Villig

Markus has explained in the past that Taxify’s strategy focuses on being the second mover, most often behind Uber .

“We go into markets where ride-sharing is already a proven concept… we come in and we improve on that by having just cheaper commissions and giving more back to the riders and drivers. We don’t want to get into this regulatory troubles and be wasting millions in lobby battles,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last year.

A key moment for Taxify was snagging investment from Didi Chuxing, the Chinese firm that acquired Uber’s China business and removed it from the country.

Didi backed Taxify via an undisclosed “eight-figure U.S. dollar sum” in August 2016 but, beyond capital, gave it access to its network of knowledge and experience, particularly around operations.

This kind of deal is common for Didi, which raised a $4 billion investment at the end of last year for expansion purposes and has backed Uber rivals across the world with capital and mentoring. Didi’s investments include Lyft in the U.S., Grab in Southeast Asia (which recently bought out Uber’s local business), Ola in India, Careem in the Middle East and 99 in Brazil, which Didi itself acquired in January 2018 for its first international expansion move.