This is not just another tale of entrepreneurship. It is about two young IIM-Ahmedabad graduates who felt the pain of city commuters and their inability to get a taxi on time, and then went on building a company that tries to make it easy to get a taxi.
Case in point: TaxiForSure.com, a startup that works as an aggregator of car and cab rentals in the city of Bangalore and also provides rentals for outstation hires.
“When we were still in jobs, we realised the need for city commuting and how essential a cab service can be,” founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G say unanimously. The cab service they started in 2011 has already made venture capitalists make a note and they have received an undisclosed funding from Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners and, in May 2012, from Blume Ventures.
Their business model is nothing new as there already are flight and bus aggregators along with many more in books and other items in the e-commerce space.
However, the duo say that they want to do the same thing in the taxi-space what others have done in bus and tourism, and, thus become ubiquitous in online taxi bookings. This is how it works. When one logs on to their website looking for cabs, the person needs to enter the pickup point and drop location and select a car of his choice.
After that, the driver and passenger get each other’s details and once agreed, the cab will reach in 15 to 25 minutes, they claim. The rate per km varies according to the type of car.
Mobile app
A mobile app for this purpose is almost ready and will be out soon.
“TaxiForSure, at present works closely with Mega Cabs, FastTrack cabs and some others in Bangalore and we not only give them leads but give them customers,” adds Raghunandan.
The company gets 10 per cent of the money from taxi operators as a fee for providing customers.
Surprisingly, the founders have also inculcated a section on their website that says premium cars where one can hire a Limousine or a Mercedes-Benz for a day at premium charges.
“Most of our bookings come in the segment of point-to-point pickup and airport transfers,” informs Raghunandan.
With an average of 100-110 bookings a day, the company now plans to expand in Delhi and Mumbai.
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