Dai Wei, founder of shared-bike business Ofo, has been busy opening a coffeeshop in Manhattan, despite labyrinthine debt back home in China.
Photo by Kuang Da
By WU Yangyu
Dai Wei, the founder of the long-forgotten shared-bike business Ofo, has started a new business in the United States. In February last year, he opened “About Time Coffee” near Gramercy Park in New York, and quickly opened another four coffee shops in prime Manhattan locations.
Sources said Dai had received funds from Chinese VCs including ZhenFund and IDG Capital and is now seeking a new financing round to push the valuation of the café chain to US$200 million (1.4 billion yuan).
About Time Coffee’s best-selling drink is boba coffee – like bubble tea, but replaced tea with coffee.
While Dai has been busy with coffee shops in the US, the shambles that Ofo became has been almost completely forgotten.
Dai founded Ofo in 2014. The dockless yellow bikes were a project at Peking University where Dai was a student. The idea soon attracted the attention of venture capitalists and by 2016, Ofo was valued at US$1 billion.
At the time, bike-sharing firms emerged and vanished like mushrooms after the rain with Ofo (yellow) and Mobike (orange) as the leading players. Both are now footnotes to history.
High operational costs and lack of funding killed off Ofo. After missing the opportunity to merge with Mobike and failing to reach a deal with Didi, Dai’s jaundiced bike empire collapsed.
While Mobike got a US$2.7 billion injection from Meituan and the opportunity to paint all those orange bikes yellow which looked a little bit brighter than its arch-enemy's, Ofo withdrew from one city after another, at home and overseas, leaving behind tangled yellow heaps of rusting bikes on the streets.
At the end of 2018, Dai was put on a government blacklist for bad debts, effectively restricting him from the purchase of high-end goods and services, including rail and air travel. Ofo itself was also been placed on a blacklist.
In 2019, Ofo made the headlines when the company refused to refund the 199 yuan deposits of more than 16 million users. Dai at the time promised to return the money, gradually.
Four years later, most Ofo users still have not got their money back. The app has ceased to operate.
In December last year, Alibaba’s Tmall sued Dai for 500 million yuan.
Tmall Technology filed a lawsuit against Ofo and Dai for failure to repay a more than 500 million yuan. Tmall lent Ofo operator Dongxia Datong 516 million yuan, with an interest of about 21.5 million yuan.
Tmall demanded that Dongxia Datong repays the arrears and that Dai assumes joint and several liabilities for repayment.
