An Uber for IntercityIf you ask anyone about their taxi booing experience from one city to another nobody will never share a seamless experience. Either they can't rely on the driver or they aren't happy with his behavior.
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While toying with the idea of starting an entrepreneurial venture inspired by the likes of Makemytrip, Anshuman Mihir met Satyakam Rahul, the CEO of Voyages India. The duo got together and soon got to work on a doctor's conference in Hyderabad. "We wanted to book flights, hotels, which was easy but, could not book online taxis, which was in bulk around 350. It was a very hard task as there were many small taxi operators. Calling each taxi operator and checking different price structures without 100 per cent confirmation left us in bad taste." With the idea to streamline the market the duo started Mytaxiindia in 2013. The idea was to offer taxi operators one platform.
Soon, they met their third co-founder, Mohit Rajapl who was working in Goibibo, and came on board in January 2014. In 2015, Vikas Jain, ex-makemytrip joined them to streamline the technology side and building an app for the company. The company provides taxis for long distance, for the people who want to travel from one city to another city.
Even though they had the expertise and were performing well, as entrepreneurs they felt some key metrics were missing! In May 2015 they joined GHV Accelerator. The 12-month programme helped them work on their strategies. And in August, they met Nihon Kotsuso, Japan's one the largest taxi company, who invested half million USD in the company for 5% stake. Besides money, the investor helped them with learning how to make standardized services in operations.
The co-founders built a global distribution system which is connecting all the operators on a common platform and reach 46.6 billion distributors and sell their taxis in the market. The core business of helping people travel inter-city has already covered 119 cities. The target is to reach 200 cities in two years opening 10,000 new routes. With close to 70,000 downloads their current ticket size is around 3500 rupees. The growth rate is a variable between variable between 30-40% with a margin of 8%.
When asked if they are providing institutional booking Mihir says, "We are building a decent system where corporates can deposit and book from there itself. We are gradually growing towards that."
(Originally published in Entrepreneur India magazine's July 2016 edition)
