Christmas comes early for Ola, secures $500M in series F funding

Wednesday November 18, 2015 , 3 min Read

Indian startups have raised more than $7.3 billion funding in the first three quarters of 2015 and with the exceptional QoQ growth rate, the year seems to end in a high. The number of deals have increased drastically and the average deal size for the total 639 deals which took place in this duration is $11.42 million.

Joining the party for the second time in the year, Ola today announced that it has closed $500 million in its Series F funding round. Baillie Gifford, Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global, SoftBank Group, DST Global and Didi Kuaidi participated in this round. The company had earlier raised $400 million series E funding in April this year.

Of growth and promises

Ola claims to have grown by over 30 times in the last one year, now clocking over 1 million booking requests a day. With over 350,000 vehicles registered on its platform, the company is present in 102 cities in India. However, while announcing its last round of funding, Ola shared its plans to expand to 200 cities by year end. The latest round of funding will be majorly used towards:

Fueling growth across existing categories.
Innovating mobility solutions for the local market.
Building and nurturing the ecosystem for driver-entrepreneurs.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Ola said,

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.

Market dominance

According to company's statement, Ola’s mobile apps accounted for a presence in smartphones of 78% cab users in India. Ola has also ventured into wide range of personal transportation options in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This includes Kaali-Peeli taxis in Mumbai, Auto-rickshaws in 6 cities, Yellow Taxis in Kolkata and Ola Share (beta) in Bangalore.

New entrant in the billion dollar funding club

With the current round, Ola has closed over $1.3 bn of external funding, of which over $1.2 bn has been raised over the past year. In April 2015, Ola raised $400 mn of funding led by DST Global in Series E and prior to that, $210 mn led by SoftBank Group as part of its Series D round in October 2014. Ola counts Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Accel Partners US and Falcon Edge also amongst its existing investors.

Indian unicorns Flipkart and Snapdeal have both crossed the billion dollar funding figure earlier.