New unicorn Ola Electric plans to enter Latin America market
Ola Electric, which has got the backing of SoftBank, Tiger Global, and Ratan Tata, has plans to deploy over a million vehicles on the Indian roads by 2021.
The newly-crowned unicorn from the Indian startup ecosystem, Ola Electric, has given a strong indication that it will enter the Latin American market.
A tweet by Marcelo Claure, Chief Operating Officer of Softbank, said, “Can’t wait to take our EV to Latam with my friend and partner @bhash Bhavish. To which Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal replied “Looking forward to @OlaElectric in Latam very soon! Cheers!
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Ola Electric recently raised $250 million investment from SoftBank in a Series B round valuing this electric vehicles business unit of Ola at $1 billion. It had also earlier raised funding from other leading names such as Ratan Tata, Tiger Global, and Matrix Partners. It has cumulatively raised a little over $300 million.
Ola has been engaged with electric vehicles for the last several years and has been doing pilot programmes on two-wheelers and three-wheelers. This startup has a very ambitious target in mind to deploy a million vehicles by 2021 and around 10,000 of them by the end of this year.
Ola Electric is also building the charging infrastructure and swappable battery for these vehicles.
In March this year, Hyundai Motor and Kia Motor announced an investment of $300 million into Ola where the focus would also be on electric vehicles.
As part of this partnership, Hyundai, Ola, and Kia will develop unique fleets and different mobility solutions. The focus will be towards building India-specific electric vehicles and infrastructure, and also offer customised vehicles to different drive partners on Ola.
Ola is the market leader in the ride-hailing market in India competing against global ride-hailing app giant Uber. It has also forayed overseas with presence in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
The domestic ride-hailing app company also recently announced that it will build a new and advanced technology centre in San Francisco which will employ more than 150 engineers there.
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