Bike As A Taxi Service, Baxi, Raises $1.5 Mn In Seed Round

Gurgaon-based 74 BC Technologies Pvt Ltd, which will launch its bike-as-a-taxi service under the brand name “Baxi”, has raised about $1.5 Mn (INR 10 Cr.) in a seed round funding from friends and family.

The startup, will start its two wheeler taxi services from 1 December in Gurgaon. Baxi has already received the necessary permits from the government of Haryana.

The first set of bikes, with a contract carriage permit and operating with yellow number plates, will be flagged off by the Deputy Commissioner of Gurgaon, Sh TL Satyaprakash IAS, at 3 PM today (November 30), at the Mini Secretariat. Sh Sushil Sarwan, the RTA Secretary of Gurgaon will also be present at this occasion. Commercial operations of Baxis – the Bike Taxis, will start from Tuesday (1st December) morning, which is also the “Car Free Day” in Gurgaon.

Started by Ashutosh Johri and Manu Rana, Baxi will offer affordable last-mile connectivity to offices, colleges, schools and residential areas, from metro and bus stations. Baxis can be hailed directly from government allocated stands, or called to the customer’s location, anywhere in the city, using a mobile application that will be available on the Google Play store.

The company is taking a 360 degree approach to safety. Health and Hygiene is taken care of by providing hair nets to all the passengers to protect their hair while wearing helmets. Each bike comes with insurance policies where even the passengers are covered for accidents. An in-house Emergency Response Team is being set up, and there will be tie-ups with hospitals across the city.

As part of the Induction Process, the ‘buddies’ will be getting police verification, and ID cards will be provided to all of them. Buddy details will be furnished to the RTA, and the local police stations. They will be given training on defensive driving, soft skills and customer handling. Technology will also be used to monitor every buddy in real time, on parameters like speed, location, and safety. Every passenger is mapped to the buddy they are riding with, and they will both have SOS buttons on their mobile app.

Speaking on the development, Ashutosh Johri stated, “We did a large seed round as we did not want to start very small and risk an early death after doing the hard work for regulatory approvals. We got 25 of our college friends and former colleagues to invest into the venture. I believe that it is good karma that people who know us so closely trusted our capabilities enough to invest in Baxi.”

The Bike Taxi is looking to get over 500 Baxis in Gurgaon in the next 3 months. The startup also plans to penetrate deep in Haryana. Johri has estimated, said that Haryana has over 75,000 Autos, from his interactions with the Transport department, and expects that the state can easily accommodate at least 50,000 Baxis.

Besides, Johri is also confident to get similar permissions from 3 more states very soon. With this, Baxi plans to again raise a sizeable next round of investment in the $25 to $30 Mn range and  has received commitment of 50% of this amount from its existing investors.

Two wheeler taxi services are already popular in many countries across the world, like New York, London, Paris, Indonesia, Thailand, Nigeria & Uganda. Baxi hopes to reach 500 bikes in Gurgaon in the next few months.

Just yesterday, in this space, M-TAXI, an on-demand app-based 2-Wheeler taxi service, had raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding led by Mandeep Singh and Jairaj Singh.

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