Chinese bike-sharing start-up says it’s now worth more than US$2 billion
The sky’s the limit for Ofo: Over three million of the company’s bright yellow bikes can be found in more than 50 Chinese cities, and their wheels have already rolled abroad to London and Singapore
By Sophia Yan
Chinese bike-sharing startup Ofo now says it is worth more than US$2 billion.
CEO Dai Wei, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who named his firm Ofo as the letters look like a bike, revealed that figure in a conversation with CNBC. It’s about double the last reports of the company’s value — which came out less than two months ago.
Such a valuation isn’t too shabby for a company that started about two years ago with its founders pooling private savings of 150,000 yuan (US$21,800) to kick things off.
Dai, for his part, is unfussed about the value of his Beijing-based firm. He even seems unaware of how astonishing it is to reach that figure for a firm that’s so young. What’s important to him, he said, is what Ofo can do for consumers.
“When you set up a company, you have to solve the problem, you provide [a] service for the users,” Dai told CNBC. “We have to figure out … what is the main problem we have to solve — that is more important than valuation.”