India’s Olacabs to expand online taxi and car booking after $20 million series B funding

India’s Olacabs combines a taxi booking function with a car rental service that aggregates from fleets across the country. Today the company reveals that it now has $20 million in series B funding to help it expand to smaller cities. Currently it covers taxis and rental cars in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, and – its newest venture – Chennai.

The $20 million investment is from Tiger Global and Matrix Partners. Tiger Global led the startup’s series A round last year.

Olacabs has 6,500 vehicles in its network across five cities. All the taxis and cars belong to third-party cab firms and rental operators. In its home city of Mumbai, there are 700 taxis available via the Olacabs website and mobile apps for iPhone and Android. The mobile apps also have a taxi-finder feature that helps you get an immediate cab pickup, with a location-based indicator of how far away the cab is.

There’s plenty of competition across all kinds of app-connected four-wheel transportation in India. If you don’t want to drive, Uber has launched in Bangalore, and there’s a homegrown challenger in the form of Savaari. If you need a simple cab, there’s TaxiForSure. Or if you want to drive, Zoom is another rental aggregator.

Olacabs’ mobile apps can be found here.

(Source: NextBigWhat)

(Editing by Paul Bischoff)