The Chinese company Ofo, which provides access to bicycle rental through mobile phones, has filled up to 22 cities in the Asian giant with its characteristic yellow bikes, reaching up to five million registered users in your app. Now its yellow bikes are coming to the West, as its service has landed in Silicon Valley and is about to do so in Cambridge, England, according to Wired.

What distinguishes Ofo from the municipal bike rental services we know, such as DBizi in Donostia – which can serve these as an idea of ​​benchmarking –? Ofo users do not have to look for parking spots previously designated by the town hall or service managers once they have used their bicycles, but they can leave them at practically any point in the city. Ofo users can search for the nearest available bikes through the app at any time of the day, and once they locate the bike, the app provides them with the code to trigger it. To return the bike, the user can park it anywhere it is legal to do so and simply re-encrypt the lock. All journeys have a flat rate price of about 60 euro cents, regardless of time and distance.

Last September, Ofo received a $100 million investment from firms like Didi, the company that stopped Uber in China. Beijing-based Ofo competes in the Chinese market with Shanghai-based MoBike, and strong competition in the sector is one of the reasons for starting the process of international expansion.