$100 million of that will go toward growing the recently acquired TaxiForSure – once the country’s second biggest taxi-hailing app.
Just one month after acquiring TaxiForSure — India's second largest taxi-hailing app — OlaCabs secured $400 million in Series E funding, BuzzFeed News has learned. As co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal told BuzzFeed News at the time of acquisition, the merged company plans to repurpose resources once used to compete against each other to "aggressively scale out" several of its core services and plans to ultimately be in 200 cities by the end of the year.
A year ago, Ola started off in 10 cities and now the newly merged company is available in more than 127 cities. And they are looking to expand into 100 more, an Ola spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
With this new round of funding, OlaCabs and TaxiForSure plan to also roll out more "localized" options for specific markets. Already, Ola has a cashless auto-rikshaw service, taxi-hailing, and a serviced called OlaPink that is dedicated to serving all-female drivers and passengers.
"The next wave of expansion is into cities that are far smaller," Anand Subramanian, director of marketing communications at Ola, told BuzzFeed News. "Usually [in these cities] the only ways to commute are self owned cars and probably tuk tuks."
Ola rolled out the tuk tuks or its auto-rikshaw service in October 2014 and has since brought on 40,000 auto-rikshaw drivers to the platform. Many of Ola's auto-rikshaw drivers, who once only accepted cash, have been given access to OlaWallet, the company's digital wallet, so they can now accept online payments. While credit card penetration in India varies highly from city to city, 50% of all transactions are still cash transactions, Subramanian told BuzzFeed News.
It's a nuance Uber India has finally caught on to. Just last week, the company rolled out its own auto-rikshaw service called UberAuto, and for the first time ever offered consumers the ability to pay in cash. But UberAuto is only available in Delhi as of right now, while Ola's auto-rikshaw service is in six cities and, backed with a new round of funding, is expected to scale tremendously particularly into cities that generally lack its own established transportation network save for auto-rikshaws and personal cars.
Late-stage and Moscow-based investment firm DST Global led the round with participation from GIC, Falcon Edge Capital and existing investors SoftBank Group, Tiger Global, Steadview Capital and Accel Partners US.
The funding comes just a few months after BuzzFeed News first reported that there have been talks of a global taxi alliance among ride-hail apps including Olacabs and two other Softbank-backed Asia-based apps, GrabTaxi and the new, yet unnamed Kuaidi Dache–Didi Dache entity.
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