Didi Chuxing raised $5.5 billion in one of the biggest funding rounds, ever

Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing firm, has raised $5.5 billion capital from a clutch of investors in the largest funding round ever in the world from a clutch of investors including SoftBank Group Corp., Silver Lake Kraftwerk, China Merchants Bank Co. and an arm of Bank of Communications. The current round valued the firm at $50 billion, significantly higher than the $34 billion at which it acquired Uber Technology’s China’s arm. Didi Chuxing is now the most valued startup after Uber, displacing Xiaomi from the 2nd position. It already counts more than 100 investors as backers including Tencent Holdings Ltd., Alibaba, Tiger Global Management and China’s sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp.

The latest round comes in the wake of heightened competition from Uber and Alphabet in the automated driving space. Also, the more stringent Chinese regulations on driver qualifications. Cities including Beijing and Shanghai have imposed stricter regulations that require drivers to be residents, cutting out thousands from the countryside who had been willing to take chauffeur jobs to make a better living. However, the company hopes driver-less technology could help it overcome such hurdles in the future. It opened an artificial intelligence lab in Mountain View, California last month, called Didi Labs, and poached Uber auto-security expert Charlie Miller.