With the taxi and car rental app market heating up, venture capital is picking up startups. Car sharing startup Didapinche, launched by a former Google China employee, has received US$10 million in its A round of funding from IDG Capital Partners.
Didapinche, with core members from major companies like Google，HP，P&G and Baidu, started operations in the O2O field with a group buy project called Didatuan in 2010. With four years experience under their belt, they looked for a new business direction at the beginning of this year and decided on car sharing.
China urban transport problems has two major characteristics – there is still much room for vehicle volume to grow, and transportation capacity is unevenly distributed.
While China has similar land area to the USA, which has 300 million people and more than 300 million privately-owned cars, China with a population of 1.4 billion has only around 140 million privately owned cars. New vehicle supply is not meeting the demand, spurring the sale of cars on a scale of 20 million cars per year.
The solution is to increase the overall transportation capacity on the one hand, and able to relieve congestion in urban centers on the other hand. Didapinche founder Jizhong Song said that they made a tiered model for urban transportation and found that the market’s density and scale would rapidly increase on all levels, from rental, taxi, car sharing to public transport. Taxi apps like Didi taxi and Kaudiche are thriving with only 50,000 to 60,000 taxis in Beijing, and there are over five million passenger cars in Beijing to support car-sharing apps.
Recently the Beijing metropolitan government issued specific guidelines concerning the classification and pricing of car sharing, adding fuel to the development of startups offering this service. Didapinche already has 100,000 users and 20,000 listed car owners in cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou since it went online in April. The funds from this financing round will enhance the company’s development in products, technology and services and accelerate the opening of new markets. (Translation by David)
