Online cab aggregator Ola has raised Series F funding worth $500 million from Baillie Gifford, Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global, SoftBank Group, DST Global and China’s Didi Kuaidi. It will use the funds for growth related activities and mobility solutions. This round of funding takes Ola’s total external funding to over $1.3 billion, of which $1.2 billion has been raised over the last year. It also has 350,000 registered vehicles (275,000 cabs and 75,000 auto rickshaws) on its platform, up from 250,000 in August, also when it was doing 750,000 rides daily, in 102 Indian cities. Ola claims that its average ETA for cab arrival has dropped to 5 minutes, while vehicles from Mini and Auto are available within 2 minutes in most cities. Its press statement claims that the company has grown over 30 times in the last year and is clocking 1 million booking requests daily. Didi Kuaidi has stakes in Ola, Lyft and GrabTaxi: In September this year, Uber’s rival in China, Didi Kuaidi, had invested in Ola’s $225 million round of funding. Didi also invested $100 million into Uber’s biggest US competitor, Lyft. And it also participated in a $350 million round of funding for GrabTaxi, a rival in Southeast Asia. Global taxi alliance? In January this year, we’d reported that Ola and the southeast Asia based GrabTaxi were in talks to form a global taxi alliance to take on Uber. The alliance was driven by SoftBank Capital and San-Francisco-based Flywheel. However, it seems that the…
