Ola Cabs

Ola Cabs is the Indian company offering services of the order of the taxi. Ola competes with Uber and other similar services.

2017: Investments from Microsoft

In November, 2017 it became known of investments of the American software giant Microsoft into Ola. Joint development of the new platform for cars became one of conditions of the signed agreement.

The exact size of the financial investments of Microsoft in Ola does not reveal. According to the Indian newspaper Mint, in July, 2017 Microsoft considered the possibility of investment of $100 million into ANI Technologies company which includes Ola service. The Reuters news agency announced on November 7, 2017 that Microsoft and Ola conducted negotiations on providing a financial support. At that time the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella was in India.

Park of the Ola cars

Microsoft — not the first investor of Ola. In October, 2017 the startup attracted about $1.1 billion from group led by the Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings and the Japanese telecommunication corporation SoftBank Group. Then in Ola announced maintaining with other investors of negotiations on an occasion of investment of $1 billion more.

The informed interlocutor of Reuters says that Microsoft can become the participant of the second investment round, and Ola completely will switch from cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure for several quarters.

According to the official statement Ola, the Indian company will use cloud services of Microsoft in the information and entertaining systems for cars. Besides, partners will be engaged in creation of the new network platform which will be used for entertainments, navigation, diagnostics and  prediction of malfunctions in vehicles. It is supposed that this platform will be able to be integrated with the automobile systems of different car makers.^[1]

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