Chinese car-ride hailing company Didi Kuaidi, the biggest competitor to Uber in China, has raised $2 billion in funding. The company has said in a statement that the amount may rise by a few hundred million due to interest from global investors. Reports suggest the funding deal values the company at $15 billion. Uber recently claimed it would spend more than $1 billion in China as it looks to expand in the country. Didi and Kuaidi fought an intense battle for the market in China before merging in a $6 billion deal in February.
Indian music streaming service Saavn has raised $100 million in Series C funding, in a round led by Tiger Global. The company will use the new funds to scale its service and move into video. A company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the deal values Saavn at $300-400 million. Previous backers Bertelsmann India Investments, Steadview Capital, Liberty Media, and Mousse Partners also took part in the funding round.
Confluent, which offers a real time data platform, has closed a $24 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures. Benchmark also participated in the round, which brought the company’s total funding raised to $31 million. Confluent’s platform is built around Apache Kafka, and the new funding will be used to increase enterprise adoption of the company’s main product. “Because Kafka was born in the modern big data environment, it is designed to simplify the management of massive real-time data streams,” Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures said in a press release. “Confluent’s platform can also support hundreds of applications built by disparate teams and is scalable, reliable enough to handle critical updates, and features a stream-processing framework that integrates easily and makes data available for real-time processing. Co-founders Jay, Neha and Jun Rao have created a highly intelligent product and we are excited to support their continued growth.”
Whipclip, an app which allows users to legally create and share clips of television shows and music videos, has raised more than $40 million in Series C financing led by Eminence Capital. Existing investors Institutional Venture Partners and Raine Ventures also participated. “Whipclip offers a new way for consumers to legally share popular television shows and music videos and for content owners to promote their programming, drive social engagement and reach new audiences,” said Richard Rosenblatt, co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Whipclip. “Eminence is an important partner as we grow our business and this investment will enable us to enhance the Whipclip platform, broaden our audience and add more content partners.”