Capital Gains: Uber’s Biggest China Rival Backs Lyft, Another Cloud Technology Unicorn and More

The ride-hailing battle in China escalated in a big way this week, yet another cloud technology unicorn was born and a bunch of other startups raised big money. Here’s what happened on the funding front in Silicon Valley this week:

Two pieces of big news on Didi Kuaidi, the dominant car service in China backed by Alibaba and Tencent: It closed a $3 billion funding round this week, and we learned that it put money into Lyft. The massive Didi round added more Chinese institutional investors, and the Lyft funding signifies the company wants to apply pressure on Uber from beyond China (Wall Street Journal).

Digital retailer ThredUp, which specializes in secondhand clothing, raised $81 million at a roughly $500 million valuation in a round led by Goldman Sachs. ThredUp has now raised $125 million in total, and the investors include Upfront Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

Okta, a startup that helps companies handle sign-in information for cloud services, raised $75 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. The money came from existing investors — including heavy hitters like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. Okta has raised $230 million altogether.

Small-business lender Fundbox raised $50 million from a group of investors including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst Parners (Fortune).

Chef, a Seattle-based cloud technology company that helps businesses run their servers and other computing processes, raised a $40 million Series E round led by DFJ Growth (Seattle Times).

Nasdaq, Visa, Citi, Capital One and other major financial companies are investing $30 million in Chain.com, a startup that focuses on developing enterprise applications from bitcoin technology. The funding sets the company’s value at around $150 million (Forbes).

Social media marketing service Unified has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by iHeartMedia, with participation from Upfront Ventures, Conde Nast owner Advance Publications and Foundry Group (TechCrunch).

Shots, the selfie-taking app that famously took early investment from Justin Bieber, raised $4 million in a recent investment round led by DCM Ventures. The company has raised around $15 million total (TechCrunch).

Source : recode.net