'We aren't necessarily looking to target a timeline for IPO': Rapido Co-founder Pavan Guntupalli

Bengaluru: Bengaluru-based ride-sharing and mobility platform Rapido, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, started its journey from the HSR-Koramangala-BTM area with an aim to create an affordable and convenient mode of transport for users. In an interaction with DH’s Uma Kannan, Rapido Co-founder Pavan Guntupalli says that a decade later, they have been able to operate in 17 cities and provide income opportunities to over 6 lakh people every single month. He adds that over these 10 years, 17,00,000 people have derived an income at some point in Karnataka alone. Edited excerpts:

It’s been 10 years since you, along with co-founders Aravind Sanka and Rishikesh SR, began the Rapido service. How has the journey been in Karnataka?

One of the important things that has always encouraged us to pursue this journey, to create this category in this country, is that most of these people are underemployed or unemployed. We have almost 30% of people who are unemployed, with Rapido as their sole livelihood, and the rest 70% are youth, people doing blue-collar jobs. For each of these guys, we add around Rs 5,000 to Rs 12,000 extra income for a mere 4-6 hours of work.

In Bengaluru, we have around 2,00,000 people operating on Rapido every single month, deriving livelihoods. We are in 17 cities such as Hassan, Hubballi-Dharwad, Mangaluru, and Mysuru in Karnataka. Rapido is currently the largest ride-sharing player in the country.

We do more than 2 million rides only in bike taxis across 400 cities, and Rapido is currently the largest gig economy employer in the country, employing almost 30,00,000 captains every single month.

What about the average earnings that captains earn each month?

If a person works 10 hours a day, which is considered as a primary livelihood, the captains earn from Rs 20,000 to Rs 24,000. If the person works on average 4-5 hours a day, their average earnings would be around Rs 10,000. For us, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru are the top-3 cities. More than 50-60% of our captains are beyond Bengaluru — almost close to 4,00,000 every month.

Panic buttons and other advanced security features have become critical tools now. How is technology solving problems?

The safety of the customer is of paramount importance, which is something that we also consider at Rapido. We already have on our app, a Rapido SOS button, which directly connects to a 24/7 hotline that is always operational. People can track and share their rides with their friends. We go one step beyond as well. Now, if a person is going on a particular route and if he/she suddenly deviates from the expected route, or suddenly stops for a long time at an unexpected place, we immediately send a trigger to the customer to check if everything is okay. If there is no response, we initiate a call, especially during late night, to increase the security level. We contact them 10-20 minutes after the ride to check if everything is okay. There are ways to ensure security. One is leveraging technology. This is a heightened safety level and security measure, giving assurance to the customer that the ride is being tracked. If something is happening, there are systems, machines, and people watching, and they will contact you, and the customer also doesn’t take any action to press the SOS button. But systems are taking action. So that is some of our dialogues with the government to make sure that we leverage technology more than the basics. While the SOS button is in the right direction, a scalable way is to leverage technology to do it in a much better way.

How are you looking at the next 3-5 years? What are your plans?

Rapido is currently the market leader across bikes and autos, and close to market leadership, second player in cabs. Overall, all three categories combined, Rapido is the largest ride-sharing platform. Now the focus is mostly going to be not just market leadership, but on ensuring drivers come on an application. We believe that every ride that happens on an app is much safer, and from the driver’s perspective, it’s more efficient. Our focus is going to be more on enabling more autos and cabs that are still not participating in the online economy, to come and participate. We will be focusing heavily on ensuring that the participation of women, the percentage of women captains in the overall captain base, is steadily and consistently increasing both in the big and smaller cities.

Founders have shed promoter tags for IPO. Are you targeting an IPO by this year-end?

For us, IPO is not a necessary timeline-based event, as of now. We would keep ourselves ready, but we would only go for it at the right time. We are not aiming for a timeline. As a company, we are growing operationally profitable, and we have enough funds to ensure our growth plans as well. We aren’t necessarily looking to target a timeline for an IPO.

Do you have any plans to increase the number of women captains? Will you be onboarding more women?

We have roughly under 2,00,000 women captains across these 10 years. This has been happening organically over the past couple of years; we have taken proactive measures both in terms of introducing and promoting a service called Rapido Pink to empower women to participate in the workforce. At the same time, we are constantly focusing on the safety of a woman captain, including having priority support, a 24/7 helpline constantly within their reach for any issues on the ground, constant monitoring, live tracking of their rides, and locations. We are now trying to actively encourage women’s participation in our captain ecosystem.

One of the services that is also available in Bengaluru is Scooty. We have realised that Scooty, as a vehicle, is more preferred by women to drive because it is gearless. It is much easier to learn and drive as compared to a regular bike. We have already launched Scooty in Bengaluru, and have received compliments, both from our women captains and women customers. Right now, Scooty contributes to almost 10% of our city rides. We aim to come up with these new modes that will encourage women to participate in the workforce and become financially-independent. If you take women captains, it is a bit harder to get them into the workforce, but once we get them, their retention is almost 70-80%, compared to a male driver, whose retention is about 60%.

You are also expanding offerings by launching Ownly (new food delivery app) in Bengaluru. Will you take it to other cities?

We have been offering logistics and courier services for eight years. Our understanding is that if a captain is coming to our platform to earn money, we should provide opportunities for him at any time during the day. What we have understood is that during the mornings and evenings, people travel a lot more to their work and offices. There’s a lot more demand. But if somebody is coming in the afternoon, not many people are travelling. But people may order food in the afternoon and evening. We aim to ensure that a captain, who joins late in the day, is able to earn money because he has that limited time to do that. We have been operating consistently, and Ownly for us is a part of the same experiment. Right now, it’s on an experimental stage, and we will definitely be expanding.