Users of China's biggest-by-far taxi app Didi Kuaidi will be able to use the app to book a Lyft ride when they are in the US, and vice-versa, under a new strategic partnership between the two.
Lyft has also confirmed that Didi has invested $100m in the business "as part of a [$530 million] financing round led by Rakuten earlier this year".
Meanwhile, Didi itself reportedly closed a $3 billion round earlier this week.
The "cross-platform interopability" between Didi and Lyft has a captive market - there were 7.8 million visits between the two countries in 2014 and that number will grow.
Lyft has produced an explanatory video:
The tie-up is being reported as an "anti-Uber alliance" based on the headline of the official statement which talk about Lyft and Didi "building toward a collaborative global ridesharing alliance", even though the two are only active in the US and China. Didi however recently invested in GrabTaxi, a taxi app which operates in South East Asia.
The voiceover for the video above is more explicit and gives the alliance a name - Rides Everywhere, "the first step in a global partnership between Lyft and Didi..."
The idea of a Lyft/Didi-led global alliance works well in theory, less so in practice - details about how the interopability will work in practice are thin on the ground, and adding other providers into the mix could raise technical, legislative, linguistic and commercial issues.
Nonetheless, with $3 billion in its warchest, Didi should have the resources to find a solution if the desire to build a truly global proposition is there.
Didi has spent some of the money already on a rebrand. According to the South China Morning Post, Didi Kuaidi has been renamed as Didi Chuxing.
So where does this leave Uber? It already has a truly global reach, operating in 60 countries, so Lyft/Didi would need to bring in lots of other partners to match that scale and to be able to deliver on the promise of "Rides Everywhere".
The rivalry between Uber and Didi has moved beyond China and could now play out on a global scale. And the real winners could be the local players - GrabTaxi in south-east Asia, easyTaxi in South America, Hailo in Europe, Ola in India.
Because if Rides Everywhere wants to gain global traction, there could be more strategic partnerships and investments on the way.