It was the only moment of relief in two years of anxiety. In November last year, Yang Lei got confirmation that Alibaba Group Holding’s financial arm, Ant Financial Services, would back his bike sharing start-up Hellobike. It meant nothing less than the continued survival of the company which Yang, a serial entrepreneur, had co-founded two years earlier when he was only 28.
A year on and the anxiety is still there, but Shanghai-based Hellobike has survived a brutal shake out in China’s bike sharing industry, emerging in third spot behind two Beijing-based companies, Ofo and Mobike.