The story of Ofo is one of the wildest rides in China’s tech history
Ofo was once one of the biggest bike sharing platforms in the world, with a plan to capture 200 cities by 2017. But the end of the bike sharing boom hit Ofo hard.
China’s dockless bike sharing boom was born out of an idea that might sound, well, insane: Placing bikes freely on the streets and expecting nobody would steal them.
Ofo was one of the first startups to try it in 2014… and it worked. The company, founded by Peking University graduate Dai Wei, was at the forefront of a Chinese tech trend that swept the world. It spread from Peking University’s campus to Chinese cities and then beyond, inspiring startups in the US, EU, and Southeast Asia.
It also left a trail of bankruptcies.
It wasn’t an original idea. Bike sharing -- which, to be honest, is more like bike rental -- existed before. But what Ofo, Mobike and dozens of other rivals did was to free the bikes from dedicated docks, making them easy to find and pay for via an app.
Ofo soon found itself riding on a wave of investors eager to jump on the next big thing. At its heyday, the startup was worth more than US$2 billion, and counted the likes of Alibaba and its financial arm Ant Financial as investors.
