Ola Electric Mobility Pvt Ltd (Ola Electric) has announced that Ratan Tata, the chairman of Tata Sons, has invested an undisclosed amount in the company as part of its Series A round of funding. He was also an early investor in ANI Technologies Pvt Ltd, Ola’s parent company.

Ola Electric Mobility recently raised a sum of ₹400 billion ($56.4 million) led by several of Ola’s early investors including, Tiger Global, Matrix India, and others, as part of its first round of investment.

The company was initially established to enable Ola’s electric mobility pilot program in Nagpur. In 2018, Ola subsequently announced ‘Mission: Electric’ to bring one million electric vehicles on Indian roads by 2021, the company stated in a press release.

The electric mobility platform has partnered with OEMs and battery manufacturers, and the company intends to work closely with the automotive industry to create seamless solutions for electric vehicle operations, Ola stated. To support electric vehicles used for commercial activities, both by the Government of India and various state governments across the country, the company also seeks to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable “clean kilometers traveled” at scale.

Ola Electric is currently running several pilots involving charging solutions, battery swapping stations, and deploying vehicles across two, three and four-wheeler segments.

“The electric vehicle ecosystem is evolving dramatically every day, and I believe Ola Electric will play a key role in its growth and development. I have always admired the vision of Bhavish Aggarwal, and I’m confident that this will be part of yet another important strategic move into this new business area,” the release quoted Ratan Tata saying.

Recently, Ola released a report titled ‘Beyond Nagpur: The Promise of Electric Mobility,’ which highlights that it would make good business sense to focus on developing EVs in the highest demand and utility sectors in the Indian vehicle market for two-wheelers and three-wheelers. The report offers insights from extensive electric vehicle operations by India’s leading shared mobility provider to help inspire business models, provide data to inform policy and encourage guidelines that will expedite the national effort to adopt electric mobility. The report has been generated using primary and secondary sources and 18 months of data collected by the company.

In March 2018, Mercom had reported on the National E-Mobility Program which aims to achieve 100 percent e-mobility by 2030. Since then, the country has taken several policy initiatives to propel the growth of electric mobility in the country.

Image credit: Ola