Recently, Uber‘s biggest rival in Southeast Asia, Grab Taxi, has raised a total of $2.5 billion from China’s Didi Chuxing and Japan’s Softbank Group in the largest single financing in the region.
The Singapore-based is also expecting to raise an additional $500 million from existing and new investors. According to TechCrunch, this new round is estimated to give Grab a valuation of more than $6 million. That’s more than double the $3 billion valuation that Grab commanded from its most recent round of funding in September 2016, when it raised $750 million.
Grab’s fundraising comes at a time when Uber has been plagued by challenges related to workplace culture, among others and comes amid a broader retreat in the on-demand economy and the increasingly tangled web of investors backing Grab, Uber and Go-Jek.
A Grab representative confirmed that SoftBank’s Vision fund is not part of the current commitment, it is coming from SoftBank Group Corp.
“We are delighted to deepen our strategic partnership with DiDi and SoftBank. We’re encouraged that these two visionary companies share our optimism for the future of Southeast Asia and its on-demand transportation and payments markets, and recognize that Grab is ideally positioned to capitalize on the massive market opportunities,” said Anthony Tan, group CEO and co-founder of Grab.
Essentially, both Didi and SoftBank are doubling down on the belief that Grab has what it takes to defeat Uber in Southeast Asia, the same way that Didi did in China when Uber agreed to sell its local business last August. That hope of defeating the Uber was reignited this month when Uber agreed to sell its business in Russia to local rival Yandex. The merger came at the grand cost of $3.7 billion.
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