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Wiwigo, an inter-city taxi service provider, has raised about $600K (INR 4 Cr) funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN) and two HNIs. IAN Investors, Priyank Shankar Garg and Harsh Chitale led the funding round, and with this Garg will join Wiwigo’s board.
Delhi-based Wiwigo is an online platform for intercity travel by cab. It was founded in 2014 by Sunil Chaula and Nilesh Pawaskar. Wiwigo offers roundtrip and multi-city travel bookings. Usually cab vendors offer one-way journeys with a round-trip fare, as they do not have a return booking. Wiwigo enables bookings for both sides and hence reduces the one way journey fare to almost half the price.
The startup is growing at the rate of 30% month-on-month on every metric. Its services are available in over 40 cities in India; including Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. The company currently has 5,000 cabs across category. It has served around 25,000 customers till date through its network of 1,200 active vendors across India.
Sunil Chaula, founder & CEO at Wiwigo said “We aggregate demand on the either cities of a route and provide back-to-back bookings to our fleet, bringing down the cost to customer by up to 50%. The inter-city taxi market is 90% unorganised, and dominated by offline agents, and we aim to standardise it while adding value to the customers. With the growing number of drivers and vehicles, we shall be able to introduce Power Smart Pricing for customers in near future. This would enable further saving of 20% for the customers.”
Wiwigo offers door-to-door price competitive and time efficient alternative. The entire process has an automated workflow, right from customer booking, vendor bidding, driver selection, car conformation, car tracking, journey alerts and customer feedback. The startup will use the newly raised funds to expand its operations to over 100 cities by the end of this year.
The intercity car rental market in India is approximately $9 Bn and it’s growing at 12% CAGR. As per Ministry of Transport, estimated inter-state passenger taxi revenue was around $3.5 Bn in 2012.
Prior to this, in January 2016, Delhi-based on-demand inter-city cab aggregator, Roder, raised about $250K (INR 1.6 Cr.) in a seed round funding from Unicorn India Ventures, an early stage startup VC fund. Other services in this segment include, Meru, GetMeCab and Savaari among others.
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