Didi Kuaidi, the market leader in the Chinese ride-hailing market, has received commitments worth at least $1 billion for its new fundraising round, which will value the company at more than $20 billion, Bloomberg reports. Didi Kuaidi is currently locked in a battle with Uber for the Chinese market, and is spending heavily to stay ahead of the American company. Uber spent more than $1 billion in China last year. Didi Kuaidi raised $3 billion last year at a valuation of $16.5 billion.
Indian online travel startup Ibibo Group has announced South African media company Naspers is investing an additional $250 million into the group. Ibibo Group is also backed by Chinese internet giant Tencent. Naspers Group CEO, Bob van Dijk said: “The Indian ecommerce market, and the online travel segment in particular, offers exciting growth prospects for us as a group. With a talented, proven management team and exceptional technology, ibibo is well positioned to benefit from an increasing number of people using online travel services going forward”.
Network intelligence company ThousandEyes has closed a $35 million Series C funding round led by Tenaya Capital. New investor GV and previous backers including Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated in the round. The company will use the latest funds to expand operations in North American and worldwide. ThousandEyes has now raised more than $60 million. “We’re seeing increasing demand as organizations begin running into significant visibility issues in the era of Internet-delivered cloud services,” said Mohit Lad, CEO and co-founder of ThousandEyes. “We’ve seen rapid growth while remaining capital efficient, and this latest round of funding gives us the resources to expand and scale our platform so more organizations can forecast and eliminate predictable issues and respond to unforeseen events at the speed of modern business.”
Parkifi, a platform which monitors parking spaces, has closed a Series A funding round worth $9.5 million. Crosslink Capital and Grotech Ventures led the round, which will allow Parkifi to expand its staff and grow nationally. “We are very excited to be working with these great firms to fund our continued growth,” said Ryan Sullivan, Founder and CEO. “Working with Crosslink Capital and Grotech Ventures allows us to reach our long-term vision, while focusing on our day-to-day goals of improving and simplifying the parking experience for everyone, significantly reducing city traffic, and providing operators with the valuable information they need to improve the efficiency of their operations. Through this round of funding, we will now be able to meet our strong customer demand more efficiently, while improving the lives of parking operators and individual drivers.”