A Saudi woman uses the Careem app on her mobile phone in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, January 2, 2017Reuters file 
A woman passes a Grab signage at their office in Singapore September 23, 2016.Reuters file 
A view of the Lyft booth during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 - Day 3 at Pier 36 on May 17, 2017 in New York City.Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch 
Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Ola, gestures as he addresses the media during a news conference in Bengaluru, India, November 22, 2016.Reuters file
Cab-hailing companies Dubai-based Careem, Singapore-based Grab, America's Lyft and India's Ola made headlines for all the right reasons in the past couple of days while bad news rocked Uber.
Dubai-based Careem saw one of its existing investors Abraaj Group sell it stake to Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud's Kingdom Holding Company (KHC). The other investor is German automobile company Daimler.
"Our investment in Careem is a continuation of our strategy to invest in new technologies as we have done with our investments in Twitter, JD.com and Lyft," KHC's CEO Eng. Talal Ibrahim Al Maiman, said in a media statement.
Founded in 2012, Careem operates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and claims to have a presence in 80 cities. The company has raised $570 million till date, including the latest Series E funding, according to an update by Tracxn.
Grab, founded in the same year as Careem, is likely to get Alibaba Group's co-founder Jack Ma as one of the investors in the $1.5 billion funding round. The fund-raising round would be led by Japan's SoftBank Group and also see participation by China's cab-hailing service Didi Chuxing, according to a report by the DealStreetAsia.
Grab has raised $1.44 billion till date and in addition to cabs, also offers motorbike taxis (GrabBike), delivery (GrabExpress) and carpooling (GrabHitch). It operates predominantly in the Asean region comprising Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru, Singapore, Manila, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City.
Grab has a tie-up with China's Didi Kuaidi, America's Lyft and India's Ola to faciliate seamless ride-booking for passengers using a single app.
India's Ola, which counts SoftBank Group, Didi Chuxing, Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management, The Vanguard Group, DST Global and Blume Ventures, raised $50 million from hedge fund Tekne Capital Management, Tracxn said, citing Economic Times.
A few days ago, Tata Motors's luxury car arm Jaguar Land Rover invested $25 million in Lyft to collaborate on self-driving cars.
Uber too grabbed headlines in the past few days, but the reasons were all too embarrassing for the company valued at around $69 billion, far greater than China's Didi Chuxing.
Adding to its woes is the lawsuit by a woman who was raped by one of Uber's drivers in India. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, has sued three current and former Uber executives pursuant to a probe that revealed that they "obtained and mishandled her medical records."
"Rape denial is just another form of the toxic gender discrimination that is endemic at Uber and ingrained in its culture," Douglas Wigdor, the lawyer representing Doe, who filed the suit in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, was quoted by the New York Times.
The company is in the news for a slew of sexual harassment cases, leading to its CEO Travis Kalanick going on leave.
The latest at the company is that an Uber board member's forced exit after he made a sexist remark during the company's all-staff meeting on Tuesday. The Recode Daily said that David Bonderman, a founding partner at TPG Capital, had to quit for his "wisecrack" about women at fellow board member Huffington.
