← Back to the club

Ofo

Bike-sharing / mobilityChina
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $3 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    2017
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $3 Billion ’18
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    2018
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
🔥 Raised & burned
$2.15B
Total raised
$1.37M/day
Burned · 4.3y alive
Funding: Crunchbase roster
Current status
Effectively defunct since 2019; unable to refund ~11M users' deposits; entered bankruptcy proceedings.

The rise & fall

8 moments · 2014–2019

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2014
Founded at Peking University
Dai Wei's campus cycling project goes dockless: scan, ride, drop the bright-yellow bike anywhere.
Wikipedia
2017
Joins the unicorn club
Alibaba- and DST-backed megarounds fund a race against rival Mobike to blanket the world's cities in yellow.
CNN
2018
The peak: ~$3B on borrowed time$3B
Roughly $2.2B raised and a ~$3B valuation — with the outspend-everyone strategy burning cash in every city it conquered.
CNN
2018
The cash crunch
By mid-2018 the war chest runs dry and the valuation evaporates within months; outspending rivals has proved ruinous.
CNN
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2018–19
Glassdoor reviews called the death early: from mid-2018 staff described the business as dying, and overseas employees blamed a secretive Beijing HQ that distrusted its own local teams, took months to approve trivial spending, and left vendors unpaid.
Dec 2018
11 million users want their deposits back
Refund requests swamp the app as trust evaporates — and the money isn't there.
CNN
Feb 2019
Goes dark — joins the Unitard Club 💔
The website goes offline and the pioneer of dockless bike-sharing is effectively defunct.
Wikipedia
2019
Bankruptcy, deposits unreturned
Ofo enters bankruptcy proceedings; some 11 million users never get their deposits back.
CNN
$3Bof peak value erased · 4 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Ofo was a pioneer of China's dockless bike-sharing boom, plastering cities with bright-yellow bikes and racing rival Mobike worldwide; backed by Alibaba, DST and others, it reached a ~$3B valuation in 2018.

Outspending rivals proved ruinous: a mid-2018 cash crunch left some 11 million users demanding their deposits back, the website went dark in February 2019, and bankruptcy followed.

Source: CNN / Wikipedia / CKGSB (peak ~$3B valuation 2018 with Alibaba, DST and others; cash crunch 2018; ~11M deposit-refund requests; website defunct Feb 2019; bankruptcy 2019)

Founder

  • Dai Wei
    Founder & CEO
    No public profile matched
🦄