Bengaluru-based mobility startup Ola has raised $139 million as part of its Series J (G4) investment round, directed by Edelweiss PE, regulatory filings showed. The filings also showed that the company paid Rs 26 crore to acquire geospatial services provider GeoSpoc.
According to the regulatory filings, Ola has now valued at $7.3 billion.
Apart from PE funds, family offices, ultra-high net-worth individuals, and corporates have also pumped in money into the company as part of the new funding round. As per the filings, Edelweiss Crossover Opportunity Fund pumped in Rs 250 crore, while IIFL Special Opportunity Fund and IIFL Monopolistic Market Intermediaries Fund jointly brought in Rs 187 crore.
This is Ola’s second investment tranche in 2021. In July, existing investors, including Tiger Global and Matrix Partners India, along with many angels, traded shares worth $500 million to Warburg Pincus and the Singapore government’s investment firm Temasek in a secondary transaction.
The deal valued the ride-hailing app at about $3.5 billion. It also saw co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal invest primary capital. Ola has been tilted by senior-level exits, with chief operating officer Gaurav Porwal and chief financial officer Swayam Saurabh leaving last month.
ANI Technologies, Ola’s parent entity, noticed revenues for the fiscal year 2021 declining 65% year-on-year to Rs 689 crore, according to filings with the Registrar of Companies.
Ola’s losses after tax were Rs 1,326 crore in 2021, compared with Rs 1,714 crore in the previous year.
For the same period, its consolidated operating revenue, including food delivery and financial services, stood at Rs 983 crore against Rs 2,662 crore in FY20.
The documents indicated that the operating loss narrowed to Rs 429 crore from Rs 1,485 crore the year before. Ola stated in the filing that its revenue had been “severely” impacted due to the prevailing Covid-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown imposed by the government.
In May 2020, Ola expressed its revenue nosedived by 95% during the initial pandemic wave in the previous two months.
In September, Aggarwal said the company’s gross merchandise value (GMV) had crossed pre-pandemic levels in the last week of August. The recovery from the second wave had been three times faster than after the first wave.
The ride-hailing platform had counted 10 million fresh users in 2020-21; he said that the firm was working on onboarding more driver-partners, entering new cities and creating new products to serve mobility pleasingly.
Ola’s GMV is the value of whole rides — cabs and autorickshaws — taken on the platform over a certain period. Meanwhile, the mobility company has extended into leasing cars and has a different arm for marketing electric scooters.
On Wednesday, Ola Electric, which serves as a separate company, stated it had raised Rs 398.26 crore in a financing round led by Temasek. This comes on the back of a $200 million funding round from Falcon Edge Capital, Japan’s SoftBank and others at a valuation of $3 billion in September.
