Formed in 2014, DiDi has already become one of, if not the biggest tech giants in China, and if we look into some of those tech giants that are born in China; Lenovo, Tencent and Alibaba to name a handful, that in itself is an incredible feat. 

But what is DIDi, and who is the mega mind behind it? DiDi is a ride sharing service, that was born when CEO Jean Liu, an ex-Harvard graduate, got fed up with the horrendous traffic problem that China has. Beijing ranks number three in most congested cities in the world, and 8 Chinese cities appear in the top 20 most congested cities. For a city as quickly developing as China, and a city that is rapidly becoming the power house of the world, Jean Liu couldn’t stand by idle as this problem got bigger, and closer to home. Even the name ‘DiDi’ is a reference to traffic, with the English translation being beep beep.

By using a clever combination of AI technology, DiDi can predict when you need a ride, and appears at your location without you actually doing anything and knows where you are going. Sometimes there will be a driver, sometimes there won’t be. DiDi cars are synced with traffic lights, traffic reports, and with a nifty thing called computer vision, which enables a safe, and stress free journey. Although this is pretty simple to use as a customer, you can be assured that a gargantuan of steps and work goes into DiDi to make it look so simple. The DiDi platform generates 70TB of data, deals with more than 20 billion routing requests, and produces over 115 million location points ever day. With over 400 million users in 400 cities, the DiDI process is, quite simply, colossus. 

Technology wise, the more you read into DiDi, and what they do, the bigger your head ache becomes. It’s the back stage to all tech giants, be it hail and rides or social media, the resources needed, and the work needed done is staggering. But when the likes of Apple are investing in you, it makes the impossible just that little bit easier. As a result of Apple being an investor, DiDi opened up an institute in Silicon Valley, wholly dedicated to the focus on AI self driving technologies. The DiDi research institute hopes that the technologies developed there will improve dispatch and route planning for future journey’s.  

At a current net worth of 56 billion US dollars, and the company seeing impressive growth in China, it is no surprise that Jean Liu is looking to take over the world. Through a series of investing’s and acquisitions of other nations successful taxi companies, and looking to expand operations to Mexico, arguable one of Ubers largest customer bases, DiDi Chuxing has already become an unstoppable force.