Lyft, one of the big players in the nascent-but-booming ride-sharing industry, said on Wednesday that it had raised $250 million from a group that includes the Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group and the investment firm Third Point.
In a blog post, Lyft said that the new investors also included Coatue Management and existing backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Mayfield. (In an interview with Fortune, the company’s chief executive, Logan Green, conceded that the start-up was valued at roughly around $700 million before the latest investment.)
Lyft is part of the increasingly popular ride-share industry, functioning effectively as a sort of dispatch network for regular drivers use their own cars to pick up passengers. Its main rival is Uber, which investors like TPG have already valued at $3.5 billion.
But while Uber carries an air of crisp professionalism â€" beyond its UberX ride-sharing service, it also offers users Town Cars and S.U.V.’s â€" Lyft promotes itself as a bit quirkier. Its drivers hang big fuzzy pink mustaches from their cars’ front grilles and often greet customers with a fist bump.
That has helped the company grow rapidly: In its blog post, the start-up said that it now operates in 30 cities, up from just two a year ago.
Now it has drawn the attention of more big-name investors. Coatue, a hedge fund, has backed popular start-ups like the messaging service Snapchat and the last-minute hotel bookings provider Hotel Tonight.
Alibaba has invested in a number of American start-ups from which it hopes to glean new insights into online commerce, even as the Chinese Internet giant readies for its own initial public offering.
And Third Point, while best known for the shareholder activism practiced by its founder, Daniel S. Loeb, has made venture capital investments for roughly 10 years.
