Ola crosses 25 mn unique customers milestone

Claims to have served over 150 mn bookings on its platform till date

India's largest ride hailing service Ola has crossed 25 million unique customer milestone and claims to have served over 150 million bookings on its platform till date.

"We are focused on our mission of building mobility for a billion people and our current rate of one million booking requests a day puts us on track towards this mission," said Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Ola, in a statement.

Ola, which recently raised an undisclosed amount of funding from China's Didi Kuaidi, says demand during peak hours is now up to 7,500 users per minute.

The company hopes to reach three million booking requests per day by April 2016.

Uber, which is the company's closest rival in India, has a presence in 25 cities in the country while Ola has over four times that at 102. Moreover, the Indian firm has over 325,000 vehicles registered on its platform and says it's adding close to 1,500 new vehicles daily.

"Our next phase of growth will be fuelled by newer, innovative solutions like Ola Share, Ola Prime and others, which are now being piloted on a large scale in select cities," added Aggarwal.

The company also recently launched a cab leasing programme through a fully owned subsidiary, with which it aims to add more drivers on its platform.

Other initiatives include Ola Pragati, where the company has tied up with banks, manufacturers, insurance, maintenance services and others, in order to make owning and running a car as an Ola partner much easier.

With investments from Didi Kuaidi and Softbank, Ola is considered part of a growing global alliance of taxi hailing services that is taking on Uber. While Uber isn't the leader in markets such as India and China, it's making strategic investments in both countries to catch up.

Back in July, Uber's country president Amit Jain had announced that the company would invest $ 1 billion in a span of six to nine months to compete with Ola.