It joins Ola’s existing investors, which includes Falcon Edge, GIC, Tiger Global Management, and SoftBank.
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The announcement was forwarded by Didi Kuaidi to tech news website TechCrunch.
Continuing to forge numerous global partnerships, in a speculated bid to circle Uber, China’s Didi Chuxing has now confirmed that it has invested an undisclosed sum into Ola.
Didi’s funding is part of Ola’s over US$500 million fresh investment round, expected to be closed shortly.
Didi has also invested in Uber’s American rival, Lyft, which shares common investors with the other companies, including Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group.
Uber and its biggest rival Didi are locked in a subsidy-intensive fight for market share in China, which is costing them each hundreds of millions of dollars.
In February this year, Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, two of China’s leading taxi-hailing apps, had announced their merger to create one of the world’s largest smartphone-based transport services firm “Didi Kuaidi”.
It has also expanded its offerings to customized shuttle services and carpooling amid growing competition with Uber and friction with domestic regulators over the legitimacy of its ride-on-demand services. Regardless of the amount invested by the Chinese company, the investment itself is significant for India’s taxi aggregators’ market. Ola has already announced a $75 million investment in India, to develop a auto leasing program.
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Ola was founded in 2011 and allows users to make taxi, rental auto, and electric tricycle reservations via its website or mobile app. Ola’s official data shows that it has over 80% of India’s mobile taxi booking market, with 320,000 vehicles in over 100 cities. It claims that it processes 7 million orders a day, across these services in China. Now the service has over 100,000 drivers, a number that has grown from 10,000 a year ago. Ola expects to use this funding to continue expanding in the Indian market.
