Didi Kuaidi and China’s sovereign wealth fund invests in GrabTaxi’s $350M round

Southeast Asia’s leading transportation app GrabTaxi now has new ammunition to battle against Uber and Go-Jek. The Singapore-headquartered startup has raised US$350 million in a round led by China Investment Corp (CIC), China’s sovereign wealth fund. Didi Kuaidi, China’s top on-demand transportation app, also invested. This is its biggest round ever, and it brings GrabTaxi’s total money received to US$700 million.

GrabTaxi announced the investment on August 19, although The Wall Street Journal earlier wrote that the round was worth US$400 million. The Didi Kuaidi involvement adds fuel to the theory that Alibaba and Softbank, by backing Uber’s rivals, could be working towards consolidation against the San Francisco-based service. Alibaba earlier invested in Didi Kuaidi.

CIC, a big investor in commodities, is putting more money into startups lately. The US$740 billion fund has also backed Didi Kuaidi, which is said to be worth US$15 billion. Coatue Management, a US private equity firm, was also involved in GrabTaxi’s latest round.

After the new round, GrabTaxi is estimated to be worth between US$1.6 billion and US$1.8 billion post-money. Go-Jek, which is leading GrabTaxi in Indonesia in on-demand motorbike transportation, recently pulled a PR stunt by hiring 16,000 drivers at a sports stadium.

GrabTaxi, meanwhile, has been aggressively poaching Uber drivers over to its platform. Its product team appears to be underperforming though, with its app widely perceived as being inferior to Uber’s. This perception wasn’t helped by news of its high-profile CTO’s departure after just one year at the helm.

The company says that the new funds will be used towards improving GrabCar, its private-car-for-hire service, as well as GrabBike, a motorcycle version of GrabCar.

With the way things are progressing, it’s probably a matter of time before Didi Kuaidi invests in India’s Ola. We’ll have to wait and see.

Updated on August 19: Added official information from GrabTaxi. This article was originally published on August 14.