New Delhi-based cab search, comparison and booking platform Cabsguru has raised angel funding from a group of investors at a valuation of $3.5 Mn. The round was led by Prashanth Ranganathan, founder and CEO of Paysense. The funds will be used by the company to further strengthen their product.
Founded in 2014 by Vikash Singh and Pulkit Ahuja, Cabsguru, is a meta-data search and cab booking platform, which allows users to compare prices and choose cabs at the click of a button. It has expanded itself to 75 cities and has emerged to be the only third party app that is providing end users with the complete end-to-end ecosystem starting from a single search for multiple cab providers like Ola, Taxi For Sure, Meru, Easy Cabs and others, to the booking, tracking and rating of cabs of these cab aggregators directly from the Cabsguru app.
The founding team is also advised by an advisory board comprising of INSEAD Angels including Dharmendra Yashovardhan, former co-founder of ixigo, Rishab Malik, co-founder of Droom and former Operating Partner of GSF Accelerator, and Devneet Bajaj, founder and CEO of M.I.T.R.A.
The startup has also announced the launch of first of its kind multiple cab operator cab search and booking bot called Robocab. Robocab has been programmed to solve the most common pain point of today’s cab users – the pain of seeing no cabs available during the peak morning and evening hours.
Says Pulkit, “The idea of Robocab came to life after going through the same problem on a daily basis. Robocab ensures that the Cabsguru users don’t have to sit and keep juggling between different cab apps like Ola, Uber, Taxi For Sure, Meru and Easy Cabs during rush hours until they find a cab. Robocab handles this for the users based on their predefined preference of time, cab operator, cab type and surge pricing. Robocab’s backend design is based upon the algorithmic trading of stocks, the only difference being that instead of buying stocks, Robocab indulges in booking cabs based on a selected set of rules defined by the user.”
As of date, Cabsguru has more than one hundred and twenty thousand organic users and handles more than a hundred thousand cab search, comparison and booking queries on a monthly basis. The company is also in the process of building a cross-vertical data gathering and analytics engine that is being designed to predict the Indian user’s impulsive preference of road travel across multiple verticals including bike taxis, self-drive cars and cab offerings from various cab providers.
The taxi-hailing space is a highly competitive category in India with Ola and Uber battling out for the top position. Last month, 7Park Data – a mobile app intelligence company released data that compares the weekly active users (WAU) of Ola Cabs and Uber in India, as a percentage of mobile device users in India (panel) during 2014-2015. The data seemed to suggest that as of October 2015, Ola turned out to be the winner with 8.93% WAU (percentage of panel), whereas, Uber was at 5.75%.
The space is also seeing the emergence of even two-wheeler players in the segment such as bike-as-a-taxi service under the brand name Baxi in Gurgaon, which raised about $1.5 Mn in a seed round funding last month. Similarly, M-TAXI, an on-demand app-based 2-Wheeler taxi service, launched in Gurgaon, raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding last month.
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