According to a recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a mutual fund managed by US-based investment firm Vanguard Group has increased its stake in India's ecommerce firm Flipkart by 64 per cent and taxi-hailing company Ola by 14.6 per cent.

The filing revealed that Vanguard World Fund valued the shares of the homegrown ecommerce firm it picked as part of the company's Series H fundraising at $128 apiece and Series G at $107.7 for the three months that ended 31 May of this year, which marks a jump of 64.7% from $77.7 and 56.7% from $68.7 respectively. The mutual fund also ended up increasing the value of its investment in Uber rival Ola from $182.7 a share to $209.5 a share.

The increase in share price by Vanguard has ended up increasing Flipkart’s valuation to about $13.7 billion and Ola to $3.4 billion.

The development comes on the lines of the recent news of Snapdeal-Flipkart merger coming to a tragic close with the Snapdeal board passing on Flipkart's offer as the stakeholders cannot come to a united decision.

Snapdeal had received a total of two offers from the Indian ecommerce leader Flipkart for an all-stake acquisition in July. Snapdeal rejected Flipkart's initial $850 million buyout offer as Snapdeal’s board felt that the offer made by the ecommerce leader undervalued their company. But, Flipkart then made a second offer of around $900 million-$950 million.

The US-based mutual fund has a total of 473,745 shares in Flipkart and 166,185 in ANI Technologies, which is the parent company of Ola.

Two months ago, the Indian ecommerce leader had raised a whopping $1.4 billion in funding from Tencent, eBay and Microsoft at a valuation of $11.6 billion. According to reports, Ola is also in midst of discussions with Tencent to raise $400 million which is expected to push the company's current valuation from $3.4 billion to over $4 billion.

As opposed to the recent development, the US-based mutual fund had in fact decreased Ola's valuation by 41 percent in November last year, which ended up bringing down the valuation of the company to around $3 billion from its peak valuation of $5 billion between April and November in 2015. Prior to this, SoftBank had the value of its investments in Ola for the second time in November last year.

Flipkart is itself recuperating from seven successive markdowns in a row that it experienced in last couple of years. The company found some relief last year when two US-based mutual funds increased its valuation. After Fidelity Rutland Square Trust II marked up Flipkart's valuation in July last year, Valic Co had also increased the valuation of its share in the company by 10 per cent and brought the company's total value to $11.5 billion.
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