Just one month after acquiring TaxiForSure — India's second largest taxi-hailing app — OlaCabs has 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 to ultimately be in 200 cities by the end of the year.
Just last year, Ola started off in 10 cities, and now the newly merged company is available in more than 127 cities. And it is looking to expand into 100 more, an Ola spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.
With this new round of funding, OlaCabs and TaxiForSure plan also to roll out more "localized" options for specific markets. Already, Ola has a cashless auto-rickshaw service, taxi-hailing, and a service called OlaPink 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-rickshaw service, in October 2014 and has since brought on 40,000 auto-rickshaw drivers to the platform. Many of Ola's auto-rickshaw 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-rickshaw service, UberAuto, and for the first time offered consumers the ability to pay in cash. But UberAuto is only available in Delhi right now, while Ola's auto-rickshaw service is in six cities and, backed with a new round of funding, is expected to scale tremendously, particularly into cities that generally lack their own established transportation networks save for auto-rickshaws and personal cars.
Late-stage, 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 had 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, as yet unnamed Kuaidi Dache-Didi Dache entity.