05 August 2016, India :
India’s leading taxi hailing service Ola raised Rs 384 crore ($57.4 million) from US-based investment management company Vanguard Group in December 2015.
The investment, which was revealed in documents filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) on Wednesday, came just a month after Ola announced its massive $500 million funding round that valued it at $5 billion. Vanguard’s investment in Ola will add to the war chest it is building to fend off an attack from Uber, which includes the $1 billion the company is in talks to raise.
Over the course of 2015, Uber significantly increased its market share by spending heavily on recruiting new cabs, paying huge subsidies to drivers, offering attractively low prices to customers and by accepting cash payments from riders.
Ola which has about 3.5 lakh cabs and one lakh autos on its platform, is looking to double the cabs on its platform by end of this fiscal. It has a presence in 102 cities as compared to 27 locations of Uber. For FY15, the taxi aggregator registered a revenue of R380 crore which was a seven-fold increase over last fiscal even as the losses rose 20 times to touch R754 crore.
Vanguard Group, with headquarters in Pennsylvania, has about $3.1 trillion of assets under management. It has inves-ted in some of the biggest technology firms globally, including Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., PayPal Holdings Inc. and eBay Inc., among others.
