Mumbai:
In new announcements for Ratan Tata, chairman and emeritus of Tata Sons, the enterpreneur has now invested in Mumbai-based Ola after taking up stake in trending companies like Snapdeal, Paytm and Xiaomi.
He has also joined the Singapore-based Jungle Ventures as a Special Advisor.
The Singapore-based Jungle Ventures has announced that Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, will come on board as a Special Advisor.
Founded by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand, Jungle Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund focussed on helping build innovative technology-led companies in Asia-Pacific.
The venture fund said it has already made investments in 30 leading Asian start-ups, including Zipdial (recently acquired by Twitter), LiveSpace, Tradegecko, CrayonData, Fastacash and travelmob (acquired by Nasdaq listed HomeAway).
In his role as Special Advisor, Tata has formally committed to spending time with Jungle’s portfolio of companies to help them build category leadership while being ethically impregnable and culturally strong in Asian and global markets, the venture fund said in a statement.
Jungle Ventures, launched with a USD 10 million seed-to-early stage fund in 2012, is currently raising a second fund with a much bigger corpus, it said.
“For Jungle Ventures, Tata believing in our vision also comes as a validation of our purpose to spawn and nurture entrepreneurship across the Asia-Pacific and help build tech category leaders,” said Srivastava, founding and managing partner, Jungle Ventures.
Some of the other advisors who currently work with Jungle and their start-ups include Gokul Rajaram, Product Engineering Lead at Square, Lim Dershing, Founder of JobsCentral, and Alon Sobol, Director of ISP/ Telco Relationships for Spotify.
Over the last two years, Tata has invested in over 10 start-ups in his personal capacity to encourage the ecosystem, including online marketplace Snapdeal, online furniture retailer Urban Ladder and most recently, taxi aggregator Ola, among others.
Ola however did not disclose the size of the stake taken or the money invested, saying the investment was made by Tata in his personal capacity.
Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, had previously invested in start-ups ranging from online retailer Snapdeal to Chinese phone maker Xiaomi.
“Tata’s strong inclination towards transportation as a segment and philosophy of creating widespread social impact through business creates a strong connection to this investment,” the company said in a statement.
Ola, which is backed by Japan’s SoftBank, had in March bought TaxiForSure for USD 200 million in one of India’s biggest e-commerce deals to take on US-based rival Uber.
“Ola, which is revolutionising transportation today and creating significant value for citizens and lasting social impact for driver-partners, will stand to benefit from Tata’s endorsement and guidance going forward in a big way,” the statement said.
Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and Co-founder, Ola, said it was company’s honour to have Tata onboard as an investor.
“This is a huge endorsement from one of the most respected business leaders of our times and reflects Ola’s commitment towards the future of mobility in India. We look forward to learning from Tata’s experience that will help us build a world class organisation from India,” he said.
Ola, founded in January 2011 by IIT Bombay alumni Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, has operations in over a 100 cities across India with 1.5 lakh vehicles registered on its platform.
Through Ola’s mobile app, customers can book cabs, autos and taxis from around them to their doorstep.
“This growth has been further accelerated with the acquisition of TaxiForSure, India’s second largest cab aggregator in March 2015.
“Ola has leveraged its strength as an on-demand platform by going beyond transportation into instant food delivery with OlaCaf�, currently available in beta across four cities,” the statement said.
The company said Tata is respected globally as one of this generation’s finest business leaders and under him the Tata Group has grown further as one of India’s most trusted business houses.
