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Venture

Morning Report: Billions For Bike Sharing Seems A Bit Frothy

Morning Report:Whatever happened to efficient growth and cashflow management?

Bike sharing startup raised a this week to fuel expansion. As the noted this morning, the new capital “comes on the heels of a $450 million March investment.”

If you can’t help but find that a bit odd, things are even more surreal than you thought.

(Sidenote before the snark: Bike sharing could be a simply massive business not only in Asia, where Ofo is based, but around the world. Our point today is that capital sources of various stripes are investing at a pace that seems a touch out-of-touch.)

Ofo by itself has raised a staggering $1.28 billion to-date. If you sum just the firm’s two latest rounds, some $1.15 billion of the total came just this year, or 89 percent. That total and timeframe works out to $6.18 million per day so far in 2017.

But Ofo has competition, notably from , another China-based startup. Mobikeitself raised in June. Its total capital raise to date is $925 million. The two combined have raised over $2 billion for bike sharing, all of it in the last 12 months.

There are other players in the space, as . Rivals include , another player in China, flush with $58.24 million in total capital raised, and , based in the United States, with a comparatively modest $12 million in raised capital.

Why two dueling bike sharing companies needed to raise over $2 billion in under a year isn’t clear. This feels a bit like the FanDuel-DraftKings fight that and the need to merge.

There are more positive takes out there — including from my friend and former colleague — but I can’t shake the idea that raising over $1 billion in a half-year for what must work out to low-margin bike sharing is probably not conservative.

From the:

Ofo raises $700M for bike sharing

  • Big bucks are going into bike sharing. Beijing-basedannounced that it has raised a $700 million Series E funding round to fuel global expansion of its dockless bike-share system. Alibaba, Hony Capital and CITIC Private Equity led the round, which comes on the heels of a $450 million March investment.

Felix Capital closes $150M second fund

  • , a London-based VC that pitches itself as a “venture capital firm for the creative class,” has closed on $150 million for a second fund that will focus primarily on early stage startups in Europe and the U.S.

Funding flows to remote workforce startups

  • Your startup may be headquartered out of San Francisco, but your employees don’t have to be. Afound at least 23 venture-backed companies have a majority-remote workforce, including two well-known unicorns,and. In other news, we examine the aftermath of Blue Apron’s IPO and consider whether public investors aretech company multiples to non-tech stocks.

iStock /Pavel1964

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