Ola acquired TaxiForSure in March 2015 for about $200 million to take on the Indian taxi-haling market and of course, Uber. Now, after 5 months of that acquisition, the company has finally decided to shut down the TaxiForSure’s operations as an independent entity.
In a blog post from the company, it announced that Ola has decided to shut down operations of TaxiForSure as an independent brand in 22 cities across the nation.
As a part of this integration of both services, your TaxiForSure account will be transferred to Ola. If you’ve added money to your TFS Credits, it will be transferred back to your Bank account and if you have promotional TFS Credits in your account, you’ll get the same amount in your Ola Money. The company said that “Everything remains the same, just the app changes”. Well yeah, there’s that.
DST-backed Ola started integrating TaxiForSure hatchbacks into its own mobile application in a separate category within the app about a month ago. As of now, TaxiForSure will be available in the biggest markets for the company – the four metros, Bengaluru, and few other small cities. The cabs of TaxiForSure will be available via Ola’s mobile app in those markets.
The list of 22 cities where the change will take place includes Ambala, Bhavnagar, Coimbatore, Dehradun, Hubli-Dharwad, Jabalpur, Jamnagar, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Lucknow, Madurai, Mangalore, Patna, Raipur, Ranchi, Sholapur, Tiruchirappalli, Trivandrum, Ujjain, Varanasi, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam.
As a part of the acquisition deal, the entire TaxiForSure’s product and engineering team had been moved to Ola. Soon after that, the startup saw major senior management re-shuffling, including co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G. quitting the company one after another, citing different reasons.
And it isn’t just the two co-founders who left the company. Almost the entire senior management team, which was originally present with TaxiForSure, left the company citing reasons ranging from lack of independence in operations, to better opportunities at other companies. It’s been stipulated that due to instability within the comapany, many of its previous employees — which includes former CEO Arvind Singhal – shifted base to other companies.
Ola on the other hand, founded in 2010, has raised a total sum of $676.8 million in six funding rounds from sixteen investors, including DST Global, SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital, among others.
Ola is looking to raise $500 million in a new funding round to take over Uber in India, which committed a staggering $1 billion investment in India over the coming nine months to strengthen its position in the market.
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