Image credit: Carlos ZGZ
China’s biggest food delivery startup (and one of Asia’s newest unicorns) announced Wednesday that the rumors are true: Chinese ridesharing market leader Didi Kuaidi has invested in Ele.me. The deal was completed and the shares transferred on Tuesday, although the financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Unsurprisingly, the companies plan to link their services to create a unified distribution system that can bring users cabs or food at the press of a touchscreen. At present, Ele.me typically delivers food within a three-mile range of the restaurant, but by tapping into Didi’s vehicle network, the company aims to expand that range to ultimately achieve city-wide delivery coverage.
In other words: right now if you want to order from Ele.me, you’re usually limited to restaurants close to you. This partnership with Didi should eventually allow you to order even from restaurants on the other side of town. Your food might get delivered to a Didi car and then hitch a ride to a last-mile Ele.me delivery arm in your location, for example.
There’s no timetable yet for the rollout of this partnership, but it may be a move that’s aimed at keeping up competition with Uber and Baidu. Uber is already in the business of food delivery in select cities across the world, and Uber investor Baidu has an increasingly powerful O2O food delivery presence through Baidu Waimai. Didi already has a big lead over Uber in the ridesharing market, but the company obviously doesn’t want to give Uber free entry into the related business of food delivery without having its own presence there.
Of course, the two companies also share a common investor in Tencent, which has been a Didi backer since 2013 and which participated in both of Ele.me’s massive funding rounds this year, including its recent US$630 million series F.
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