Electric Vehicle (EV) ride-hailing company, BluSmart has raised around $42 million in a mix of equity and debt funding from BP Ventures, and several other existing investors, multiple sources aware of the development told Moneycontrol.
Over 50% of the total capital infusion came from founders, Anmol Jaggi and Punit Goyal, to increase their stake in the company, and have financed this round by themselves, the people cited above added. Jaggi and Goyal have both been entrepreneurs before founding BluSmart.
Jaggi started Gensol, a company in the renewable space around 2007 while Goyal upstarted PLG Power Limited and PLG Clean Energy Projects, both in the solar energy space in 2008 and 2014 respectively.
This is a bridge, or its Series A2 round, for BluSmart, which has positioned itself as a competitor to Ola and Uber. And its Series B round will be a larger round, upwards of $100 million, scheduled to be announced later.
Look at this round as "the warmup one does before hitting the gym (implying a larger fundraise later)," a person said.
BluSmart declined to comment on the developement.
Excluding the current round, BluSmart has so far raised over $70 million from Green Frontier Capital, Mayfield, Survam Partners, and many more, including several angel investors.
The company will likely use the fresh funds to expand its operations. In the next 12-18 months, BluSmart plans to add 40,000-50,00 more EVs as it enters newer regions like Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai, and go deeper in existing cities such as Mumbai and Bengaluru.
That was after BluSmart had a fleet of over 5,000 EVs in the Delhi-NCR belt and in Bengaluru by the end of FY23. Founded in 2019 by Anmol Jaggi and Punit Goyal, BluSmart entered Bengaluru in September last year.
BluSmart’s ways of operating are different as opposed to the more established players, like Ola and Uber. BluSmart owns all the cars that it runs, and has drivers on the company’s payroll, thereby earning higher margins than what other players do.
The company prefers operating in the top seven cities of the country and has also expressed its inclination towards longer trips, like traveling to and from airports, as the economies per trip work out better when compared with intra-city rides.
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