Ola Electric joins the unicorn club after $250 million investment from Softbank

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank has invested around $250 million in Ola Electric Mobility. With this, the electric vehicle unit of ride sharing aggregator Ola has become the newest unicorn from India, at par with the likes of Flipkart, Zomato, Paytm, as well as its parent company.

As per regulatory documents filed with the Registrar of Companies, Ola Electric issued "4,326 fully and compulsorily convertible series B preference shares of face value of Rs 10 each having the rights, privileges and preferences..." to SB Topaz (Cayman) Ltd. The Japanese investor paid a total of Rs 1,725.04 crore (around $250 million) to the Indian company, the filing further said.

The SoftBank funding was received on Tuesday in light of a special resolution passed by the board of Ola Electric on June 25.

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Earlier this year in May, Tata Sons' Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata invested an undisclosed amount in Ola Electric. This investment, which was part of company's series-A round of funding, was in Ratan Tata's personal capacity. This year, in March, Ola Electric had announced raising Rs 400 crore in a funding round led by Tiger Global and Matrix India.

Ola Electric was initially established to enable Ola's electric mobility pilot programme in Nagpur in 2017. Last year, Ola announced 'Mission: Electric' to bring 1 million Electric Vehicles (EVs) on Indian roads by 2021.

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Recently, Ola raised $300 million from South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motors along with its affiliate Kia Motors. As part of the deal, Hyundai plans to introduce its EVs in the cab fleet of Ola by 2021.

Led by Anand Shah, and Ankit Jain, Ola Electric is currently running several pilots to deploy electric vehicles and charging solutions. In April, the company claimed that it would introduce a fleet of 10,000 electric vehicles over the next one year.

(Edited by Vivek Punj with PTI inputs)