Taxi-booking app Ola (formerly Olacabs), has raised $400 million in a Series E round from Russian investor DST Global along with GIC, Falcon Edge Capital.
The company in a press release said the existing investors SoftBank Group, Tiger Global, Steadview Capital, and Accel Partners US also participated in this round.
The Bangalore-based company had in October last raised about $210 million from Japan's SoftBank Group.
With the current round it has raised up to $678 million from about 18 investors since its inception in December 2010. The company competes with Uber and Meru Cabs at the moment.
Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Ola said, “DST Global, GIC and Falcon Edge have been partners in some of the leading Internet success stories globally and we are excited about having them onboard. Our vision is that people shouldn’t find the need to own a car. And we have been able to make this possible for millions of customers in the past four years by creating over a hundred thousand driver entrepreneurs on the platform."
With increasing smartphone penetration and immense growth in smaller cities and towns, Ola hopes to be able to drive the benefits of this on-demand platform deeper into the lives of its customers and partners, he added.
With just 10 cities last year, Ola's growth has been exponential. It is now present in 100 cities by revolutionising personal transportation across cabs, taxis, and auto-rickshaws. It plans to cover 200 cities by the year-end.
The additional investment will allow Ola to go deeper into smaller cities with its small car category, Ola Mini, to build personal transportation ground-up.
The company recently acquired its biggest rival, Taxiforsure, thus further accelerating its growth.
Besides, it is leveraging its strength as an on-demand platform by going beyond transportation into instant food delivery with OlaCafé. It is at present test marketing the product in four cities.