The electric vehicle arm of Ola is set to get an investment boost from Hero Group Chairman Pawan Munjal as an individual investor. The deal is reported to be at the level of discussions and therefore no indication of the size of the investment is available as yet.
The entity, Ola Electric Mobility Pvt Ltd is just a year old and has been quite successful in attracting investments and even reached the Unicorn status in just a year. The profile of investors include SoftBank Group and Tiger Global apart from India’s own Ratan Tata.
Besides these entities, Arun Sarin, a former Vodafone executive has also invested and has been co-opted as an independent director on Ola Electric’s board.
Bhavish Agarwal, the founder of Ola has faced certain issues in the past with the position of the major investor, Japan’s SoftBank getting stronger. Agarwal has been trying to avoid seeking more funding from the Japanese investor. If the deal with Pawan Munjal goes through it makes life easier.
With this kind of backing Ola Electric can go about reaching its objective of deploying a million electric vehicles on the road by 2021. From the perspective of Pawan Munjal, Hero’s plan of manufacturing electric scooters and motorcycles will may have a ready customer in the form of Ola Electric. The government has already expressed its intentions of pushing the electric mobility aggressively, very clear.
The main ride-share business, Ola Cabs has already entered into an arrangement with Hyundai through which the South Korean company has invested $300 million in Ola. In this arrangement too, there are provisions for Hyundai and its group entity Kia Motors developing and delivering electric cars.