It seems that the homegrown cab-hailing service provider — Ola, is now looking to expand its operations to other countries, starting from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Recently, the company posted a job opening for these two countries on its LinkedIn page. As per the posting, Ola is looking for operations expert in Dhaka and Colombo.
Last month, it was reported that Ola is looking to expand its business to Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh. However, the spokesperson of the company declined to shed light on the matter.
Based on where the matter stands now, it is safe to say that the company could launch its operations in those countries within a month or two. It is noteworthy that the Bangalore-based startup’s biggest rival in India — Uber, has already set up its operations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Ola is also well-equipped with the capital requirements for the expansion. The company has been on a funding spree from quite some time, raising new funding rounds every now and then. It recently raised Rs 231 crore from New York based hedge fund Tekne Private Ventures.
In this year only, the company has so far raised around Rs 963 crore ($150 million). The funding for the company came from Ratan Tata’s VC firm RNT Capital Advisors, Falcon Edge, among others. Last year, in November, it had raised Rs 1,604 crore ($250 million) from SoftBank – in a down round – decreasing the company’s valuation.
Ola is also looking to raise more funding. As we reported earlier, the company is looking to raise around Rs 2568 crore from Tencent, which recently invested in Flipkart’s massive funding round. It is also in talks with Microsoft for investment of around Rs 640 crore.
Looking at the company’s efforts to raise as much capital as it can, it seems that the company’s plans are much bigger than just expanding to two countries.
Ola has reported a seven-fold jump in revenue. It reported revenue of Rs 758.23 crore in the year ending on 31 March 2016. However, the company’s losses nearly tripled to Rs 2,313.7 crore due to heavy discounts and drivers incentives. Uber claims it is bigger than Ola, whereas the executives and investors at Ola claim that Uber is less than half of Ola’s size.