Beijing-based bicycle rental start-up ofo, has raised a funding of $866 million led by Alibaba Group, with participation from Haofeng Group, Tianhe Capital, Ant Financial and Junli Capital. The company will use the funds to accelerate its growth and development globally. Founded in 2014, ofo offers dockless bicycles on rent, which means the bikes are distributed around the city or campus to be rented per trip instead of dispensing them from one station. The bikes are tracked via GPS, and can be located by users, paid for and unlocked using their smartphones. ofo currently operates in 250 cities across 21 countries including India and claims to have 200 million users globally. The company entered in India early this year starting with Pune, Coimbatore, Indore and said it will soon expand to more cities like Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai. Bike rental space in India Note that there is a sudden focus on bicycle rental or sharing in India. In December 2017, cab aggregator Ola introduced ‘Ola Pedal’, its own bicycle sharing platform, starting with college campuses like IIT Kanpur. In November 2017, we found out that InMobi’s co-founder Amit Gupta has started an IoT-enabled bicycle rental company Yulu in Bangalore, which is yet to roll out its vehicles on the road. In October, Self-drive car rental company Zoomcar launched PEDL, a cycle rental service in the country, starting with Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata. There are some more players which are already offering bike rental or sharing services via tech platforms in the country, like Letscycle, Rentomo, RentOnGo,…
