Beijing Youyou Lianchuang Tech’s P2P car sharing platform UUzuche announced it received US$10 million funding from China’s largest car service and sales website BitAuto in its plus-A Series financing.
Billing itself as China’s car Airbnb, UUzuche established in early 2014 has a service network covering Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Sanya, Haikou and Xiamen, connecting 65,000 car owners and 130,000 renters as of early 2015. It already raised US$10 million in the Series A financing round in August 2014.
UUzuche will use its latest financing on opening new markets, marketing /advertising and recruitment, while focusing its resources on market promotion, platform operations, building its car pool and additional distribution channels, according to a company spokesperson.
“BitAuto can offer us tremendous support in the areas of car resources, customers and marketing channels. UUzuche’s linkup with BitAuto can re-allocate surplus resources from auto suppliers to address regional shortages and provide potential customers with experiences that will affect their future purchasing choices,” he said.
A BitAuto spokesperson said: “UUzuche’s service penetration concept focusing on operations and constant optimization of its car sharing niche service will help it gain a market advantage in the upcoming competition. For our part, BitAuto will funnel supplier and customer resources and business experience to UUzuche while jointly reorganizing auto manufacturing and sales channels to better meet and consumer purchasing and usage demands.”
Previously, BitAuto, JD.com and Tencent jointly announced a partnership agreement in which the latter two companies will invest US$1.3 billion in BitAuto. Meanwhile, the scale of China’s car rental market is forecast to grow to RMB65 billion by 2018 according to Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. (Translation by David)
