ola

Ola, India's biggest cab-hailing service, said on Wednesday it had raised $500 million in a funding led by Baillie Gifford, Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global, SoftBank Group, DST Global and China's biggest taxi aggregator Didi Kuaidi.

Bengaluru-based ANI Technologies, the parent company of Ola, will use the freshly raised funds in fueling supply initiatives, building supply capacity and to go deeper into existing markets.

So far Ola, one of India's unicorn startup, has closed over $1.3 billion of funding, of which about $1.2 billion has been raised over the past year.

Ola competes with US-based Uber Technologies in India. The latest round of funding comes just months after San Francisco based Uber's announcement to invest $1 billion in India as both Ola and Uber eyeing market leadership in India. For Uber, India is largest market outside the United States.

Over the past few months, Ola has also introduced a bunch of new services to take on Uber, including shuttle services, expanding its mobile wallet, new grocery app and introducing WiFi-cars to select users and running a cafe service on its app.

Ola is expected to cross annual gross revenue run rate of $1 billion by the end of the year, boosted in part by the $200-million acquisition of rival TaxiForSure, whose revenues have doubled since the deal closed in March this year.

In 12th November Ola has acquired Geotagg, a trip-planning applications company, for an undisclosed sum to strengthen its new bus-shuttle service.

Founded in 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal (currently CEO) and Ankit Bhati, Ola has expanded to a network of more than 200,000 cars across 85 cities. In November 2014, Ola expanded to incorporate autos on-trial basis in Bangalore. Post the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune and Chennai starting December 2014. Ola was valued at $5 billion as of September 2015.
Advertisements

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post
Like this content? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get latest updates.