China-based taxi hailing app developer Didi Dache raised $700m yesterday in a series D round featuring internet company Tencent.
Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek co-led the round with investment firm DST Global.
Didi Dache has now raised almost $820m in total, closing a $100m series C round in January led by Citic PE, the private equity unit of Chinese state-owned investment firm Citic Group, and which also included Tencent.
Tencent earlier invested $15m in the company in May 2013, and Didi Dache integrates with Tencent’s WeChat social networking app to allow users to book cabs directly from WeChat.
Didi Dache, which claims to have accumulated 100 million users and one million drivers, is one of two taxi ordering apps that have an almost 100% market share in China. The other is Kuaidi Dache, which counts e-commerce company Alibaba and car rental firm eHi among its backers.
The funding will enable Didi Dache to fight its corner more effectively, competing not only with Kuaidi Dache but US-based Uber, which plans to use the $1.2bn it raised last week to expand further into Asia.