Indian car aggregator and mobile booking app company, Olacabs has raised Rs. 250 crore in fresh round of funding led by Steadview Capital and Sequoia Capital according to a ToI report. Their existing investors Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital also participated in this round.
Importantly, this funding puts Olacabs into exclusive club of few Indian internet & mobile startups that are now valued at over Rs. 1000 Cr.
Olacabs was founded by 2 IIT Bombay alumni’s, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati in 2011 and have been growing quite aggressively since early days.
The latest round of funding is their fourth – They first raised seed funding in April of 2011 from angel investors like Rehan Yar Khan, Anupam Mittal and several others. A year later, they raised their Series A funding of over $3 million from Tiger Global. Last year in November, Olacabs raised their Series B funding of around $20 million (no official confirmation on this number).
Including this round, Olacabs has raised a total $65 million in funding to date.
In a interview with ToI, Olacabs Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said that money raised in the latest round will be used to expand in new cities, categories and strengthen the cab aggregator’s driver ecosystem.
Car rental space has seen lot of activity over past year or so, especially with Uber (who were recently in news for notching up over $17 billion valuation) entering and expanding in India quite aggressively. With their entry, India’s already competitive market in car rental space has become even more crowded.
This round of funding will definitely give Olacabs the funds it needs to go head on with Uber who are flush with cash.
Currently Olacabs has over 11000 vehicles across 9 cities and is clocking an average of 12000 bookings per day. Interesting, half of those bookings are happening through their mobile app.
Apart from Olacabs, India currently has over 10 small and big players in car aggregation and booking space that includes companies like TaxiForSure, ZoomCar, Savaari, GetmeCab, and few others.
There have been lot of VC funding activity around this space in recent times not only in India, but across the world. Olacab’s competitor TaxiForSure had also recently raised $10 million funding from Bessemer Venture Partners.
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