Cabify owner Maxi Mobility raises $160M from investors, including SoftBank's Japanese rival Rakuten, valuing the business at $1.4B
Aliya Ram in London and Andres Schipani in São Paulo — Maxi Mobility has raised $160m from investors including SoftBank's Japanese rival Rakuten …
Context & Ripple Effects
This round marks a steep repricing for Madrid-based Maxi Mobility: its $120M raise at a $320M valuation in 2016 was also led by returning investor Rakuten, meaning the company has more than quadrupled its valuation in under two years while taking on Uber in Latin America.
The round fits a broader pattern in the corpus: Rakuten has been quietly assembling a portfolio of regional Uber rivals — backing Lyft, leading Cabify, and reportedly leading Careem's $500M Series E — while its arch-rival SoftBank funds the other side of the map through 99 and Ola.
First-order effects
- Maxi Mobility gains $160M and unicorn status at $1.4B to fund Cabify's push against Uber in Spanish-speaking Latin America, a region where SoftBank-backed 99 just raised $100M because Uber's margins there are among its highest.
- Rakuten deepens its counter-position to SoftBank: rather than chasing SoftBank's deals, it keeps doubling down on its own stable of regional challengers.
Second-order effects
- With SoftBank preparing to fold $20B+ of ride-hailing stakes (Uber, Ola, Grab, Didi) into its Vision Fund, the Latin American gap in that portfolio makes locally entrenched players like Cabify and 99 acquisition-relevant assets for both camps.
- The pricing benchmark moves: if a regional player with no disclosed path to profitability clears $1.4B, peers like Taxify — fresh off Daimler's $175M round at a $1B valuation — can justify comparable or higher marks in their next raises.
Third-order effects
- Ride-hailing is structuring around a handful of strategic capital sources — SoftBank, Rakuten, Tencent, and now automotive entrants like Daimler — each backing competing regional networks, which entrenches multi-front competition instead of a single global winner.
- If every credible regional challenger can command a $1B+ valuation on strategic money alone, exit pressure shifts toward consolidation among the backers' own portfolios, making cross-border acquisitions between regional champions increasingly likely.
The trend: Regional ride-hailing champions are being repriced into the billions by a small set of dueling strategic backers — Rakuten versus SoftBank chief among them — turning Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia into proxy battlegrounds against Uber.