India taxi-booking service Ola closes Series E round at $400m
Indian taxi-booking service Ola - operated by ANI Technologies - has closed its latest Series E round of funding at $400 million, valuing the company at $2.4 billion. The round was led by DST Global.
It emerged last week that Ola had raised $315 million from DST, Tiger Global Management, Steadview Capital, Accel Partners and handful of smaller investors. With this latest announcement, Singapore's GIC Private and hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital have been added to the investor roster.
A breakdown of the round was not revealed by the company but according to independent research firm Tofler - which cited a Registrar of Companies filing - DST contributed about $206 million to the round, while Tiger Global and Steadview put in $40.7 million and $10.5 respectively. Accel, which had backed the recently acquired TaxiForSure, contributed a further $5 million.
The investment makes DST Global the fourth largest shareholder in the company behind Softbank, Tiger Global, and Matrix Partners. The deals comes a month after Ola acquired rival TaxiForSure for $200 million in a cash and stock deal. Aside from Accel, the merger also saw TaxiForSure backers Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures, take stakes in the new business.
Set up in 2010, Ola has now raised just over $640 million across five rounds, not including the $40 million raised by TaxiForSure prior to it being bought. Ola's last funding round was led by SoftBank which invested $210 million with Matrix Partners, Steadview, and Tiger Global last October. Before that, Steadview and Sequoia led a $41 million round in July.
The new capital will add to Ola's war chest as its looks to secure a dominant position in the market. In its statement, the company said it will expand into smaller cities and build its technology platform. Ola now claims to have increased its footprint more than ten-fold from just 10 cities a year ago, and says it plans to be in 200 cities by the end of 2015.
Ola and TaxiForSure - which still operate independently from each other - already have a bigger combined presence than global rival Uber in India. Riteshi Bangali, a partner with Helion, estimates the combined entity is around 10 times the size of Uber India in terms of rides.
"With increasing smart phone penetration and immense growth in smaller cities and towns, we will be able to drive the benefits of this on-demand platform," said Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of the company, in a statement.
Private equity and venture capital investors are pursuing taxi-booking platforms across the region. In China, DST is one of the backers of Didi Dache, while Tiger Global and SoftBank lined up behind its direct rival Kuaidi Dache. It was announced in February that the two would merge. SoftBank also led a $250 million round for Southeast Asian taxi aggregator GrabTaxi in December. Tiger Global is also an investor.
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