By Nishant Sharma
Ride-hailing platform Ola will raise Rs 650 crore (about $93 million) from Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, two people privy to the development told BloombergQuint.
Bansal had already invested Rs 149 crore in the cab-hailing company as part of the Series-J transaction, the company’s filings with the Registrar of Companies showed. Bansal has so far received 70,588 preference shares at a subscription price of Rs 21,240 per share, according to documents. The rest of the money will come in separate tranche.
Last week, Ola—owned by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.—raised Rs 520 crore ($74 million) in a fresh funding round from existing investor Steadview Capital.
37-year-old Bansal, who quit Flipkart a day after Walmart announced that it was taking over the e-tailer in May, has been an active investor and has been scouting for deals as he made close to $1 billion selling its 5.5 percent stake to Walmart. Bansal’s other investment include SigTuple, scooter startup Ather Energy and news aggregator Inshorts.
Bansal has also registered a new venture, BAC Acquisitions Pvt. Ltd., along with former investment banker Ankit Agarwal. The venture which came up in December is said to develop and provide services through information technology-driven internet and mobile platforms, as per the filings. It said the venture will also focus on areas such as energy, media, financial services, agriculture, retail, gaming to name a few.
Ola’s Funding Drive
The investment is a part of a bigger round of between $1-2 billion Ola is looking to raise, the people cited earlier said on condition of anonymity as they’re not authorised to speak to the media. Ola aims to double down on its efforts on international expansion and boost its food ordering platform Foodpanda which it acquired in December 2017 for about $200 million, the people said, adding that more money is expected to come in multiple tranches.
A group of investors, including Singapore’s Temasek, SoftBank Group Corp. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., Naspers, are likely to participate in the round, one of the persons cited earlier said.
Last month, The Economic Times reported that Ola is looking to raise $1 billion in a fresh funding.
Ola—which looks to build a bigger war chest to take on its rival Uber—had last raised raised $1.1 billion in October 2017 in a funding round led by Tencent Holdings Ltd. and SoftBank. At that time, the company had said that it’s in advanced talks with other investors to close an additional $1 billion as part of the current financing round.
The article was published in Bloomberg Quint.
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