Global competition to ride sharing service Uber, Inc. may be set to ratchet up a notch with the company’s main competitors in Asia and North America in talks to form a global alliance.

Heavily venture capital funded, and China’s largest taxi hailing app provider Didi Kuaidi (Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc.) leads the group with the announcement that it has formed a formal alliance with Lyft, Inc., at the same time investing $100 million into Uber’s main rival in the United States.

According to reports, under the terms of the alliance, users of each app will be hail rides from drivers of the other app while they are traveling to the other country, and in a bonus in an age where banks still charge stupidly large amounts for foreign currency conversions, each service will collect payment from its own users in their native currency.

The tie-up doesn’t stop with just Lyft and Didi Kuaidi however, with the companies talking to Singapore based South East Asian taxi hailing service GrabTaxi Holdings Pte. Ltd., and India’s Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) to create an even larger alliance.

GrabTaxi, also known in some territories as MyTeksi, operates across the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) nations of Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and while goes head to head with Uber in major cities such as Bangkok and Ho Chi Mihn City, also offers services in regional cities that Uber doesn’t cater to, such as Chiang Rai in Thailand, and Kuching in Malaysia.

Ola has quickly become India’s most popular hailing app, and like its potential partners in the global alliance is seriously venture capital backed, having most recently raised $222.5 million on a $5 billion valuation of September 15.

Coalition of the willing

Presuming that GrabTaxi and Ola come onboard in a similar way to the Lyft/ Didi Kuaidi deal, Uber has a coalition of the willing on its hands, one that has as its main goal to crush it where ever each member competes.

It’s also a somewhat strange coalition, be it one with legal advantages: Lyft operates an Uber like ride sharing with the distinct advantage that it operates legally in every city it operates, where as the other three are services that allow users to hail existing licensed taxis; that’s a strength against Uber particularly in places where they are facing legal challenges, such as in Indonesia.

For users the tie-up is without doubt a win, providing competition to Uber when they travel the world, but whether it will dent Uber’s onward surge of success, or is simply a speed hump in the road for the king of the unicorns, is another matter.

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