Sachin Bansal buys stake in Bhavish Aggarwal’s Ola

Sachin Bansal has invested $21 million in Bhavish Aggarwal’s Ola, marking his first investment following his ouster from Flipkart

Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal and Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal. Bansal was ousted from the company he founded after the Flipkart-Walmart deal.

Bengaluru: Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal has invested $21 million in India’s largest cab-hailing platform Ola (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd), marking his first investment following his ouster from Flipkart after the Walmart deal, which resulted in him selling his stake in the online retailer for nearly $1 billion.

Part of a bigger funding round, Bansal is expected to infuse further capital into Ola. He has been issued 70,588 series J preference shares at a price of ₹21,250 per share, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC)—sourced from data intelligence platform Paper.vc.

Mint had reported earlier that Bansal was looking to invest nearly $100-150 million in Ola.

As part of the same round, Ola recently received $74 million from existing backer Steadview Capital. The latest round had pulled up Ola’s valuation to $5.7 billion.

The Economic Times newspaper had also reported that Bansal has finalised an investment of up to $100 million in Ola, making it his largest personal investment.

In October 2017, Ola had raised $1.1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $3.5-4 billion from China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd and existing investor SoftBank Group Corp. and had said that it was in talks to raise an additional $1 billion.

Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal has been looking to bring in more capital through new investors to avoid ceding control to SoftBank, which currently holds roughly 26% in the company.

Ola has also been shoring up its core cab-hailing business in India against Uber Technologies Inc. As part of its plans, it is looking to aggressively expand its footprint abroad and within India, besides building a strong foodtech business to compete with sector incumbents Swiggy and Zomato. As Mintreported earlier this week, Ola is also looking to foray into the medicine delivery space through an investment in Myra Medicines.

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