Chinese food delivery start-up Ele.me confirms Didi Kuaidi investment

The partnership may be aimed at keeping up competition with Uber, which is already in the food delivery business, reports Tech in Asia

China’s biggest food delivery start-up announced Wednesday that the rumours are true: Chinese ridesharing market leader Didi Kuaidi has invested in Ele.me. The deal was completed and the shares transferred on Tuesday, although the financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed.

Unsurprisingly, the companies plan to link their services to create a unified distribution system that can bring users of cabs or food at the press of a touch screen. At present, Ele.me typically delivers food within a three-mile range of the restaurant, but by tapping into Didi’s vehicle network, the company aims to expand that range to ultimately achieve city-wide delivery coverage.

  There’s no timetable yet for the rollout of this partnership, but it may be a move that’s aimed at keeping up competition with Uber and Baidu. Uber is already in the business of food delivery in select cities across the world, and Uber investor Baidu has an increasingly powerful online-to-offline (O2O) food delivery presence through Baidu Waimai. Didi already has a big lead over Uber in the ridesharing market, but the company obviously doesn’t want to give Uber free entry into the related business of food delivery without having its own presence there.

Of course, the two companies also share a common investor in Tencent, which has been a Didi backer since 2013 and which participated in both of Ele.me’s massive funding rounds this year, including its recent $630 million series F.

---

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.