Homegrown cab aggregator Ola seems to be on a fund-raising spree. After an infusion of nearly Rs 400 crore, reports now suggest that Ola, operated by ANI technologies has raised Rs 670 crore in a fresh round of funding from Ratan Tata’s RNT Capital Advisers and Falcon Edge.
This comes after Ola received a board approval to raise $100 million.
As per a report by VCCircle, while Falcon Edge invested around Rs 402 crore, UC-RNT Fund, a JV between RNT Capital and University of California Investments invested Rs 267.9 crore. This has been sourced from Ola’s filings with the Registrar of Companies by VCCircle.
With this, Ola has raised a total of $1.5 billion of funding.
As per the report, Ola issued 4.95 lakh shares at Rs 13,521 apiece. And this is higher than price at which it recently allotted shares to existing investor SoftBank Group Corp where it raised Rs 1,675 crore.
This funding expands Ola’s war chest to take on rival Uber in the highly competitive tax hailing space in India. In FY16, Ola reported revenues of Rs 438.6 crore as against Rs 57.5 the year before that. However, its loses tripled to Rs 2,3117 crore.
Founded by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati in 2010, Ola has previously raised funding from marquee investors such as SoftBank, Tiger Global and Matrix Partners.
As per the report, in the past, Ola raised $500 million in a Series F round from Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford, China’s Didi Chuxing and other investors in November 2015. It also raised $400 million in a Series E round led by DST Global in April 2015 and $210 million in its Series D round led by SoftBank in October 2014.
As per a report in the Economic Times, Ola has a market share of 65% in India, making it the market leader ahead of Uber.
Nationally, Ola operates in over 100 cities, with more than 5,00,000 vehicles attached to its platforms and over 5,50,000 driver-partners on board.