India’s most popular mobile application for availing taxis, Ola, announced on Wednesday that it has an received investment of USD 500 million in its series F funding round.
The bulky investment will enable the company to accelerate its growth in the Indian market. The participants in the series F funding were Baillie Gifford, Falcon Edge Capital,Tiger Global, SoftBank Group, DST Global and Didi Kuaidi.
Ola has registered massive growth in the last one year, climbing up by over 30 times in the period. According to estimates, the app has 3,50,000 vehicles registered with it, and gets over one million booking requests in one day, across 102 cities in India.
In a statement, Bhavish Aggarwal, the co-founder and CE said, “As we pursue our mission to build mobility for a billion people, we are excited about bringing onboard partners who can help us get there faster.”
“We will continue to build for the local market through innovative solutions like Ola Share, Ola Prime and Ola Money, as we grow the mobile ecosystem in India,” Bhavish added.
Ola has been recording growth even in two and three tier cities, and this includes Kaali-Peeli taxis in Mumbai, auto-rickshaws in six cities, Yellow Taxis in Kolkata and others.
Ola in the past closed over USD 1.3 billion of external funding, over USD 1.2 billion raised over the past year.
In April 2015, Ola raised USD 400 mn of funding led by DST Global in series E and prior to that, USD 210 mn led by Soft Bank Group as part of its series D round in October 2014.
(With ANI inputs)