Cabsguru, a Delhi-based startup which has built a platform for cab search, comparison and booking, has picked up $200K in angel funding round which was led by Prashanth Ranganathan, who is founder and CEO of Paysense.
With this newly raised funding, the company is now valued at around $3.5 million and will still be looking to raise more money, around $150K more in the same angel funding round.
Founded in 2014 by Vikas Singh and Pulkit Ahuja, Cabsguru’s mobile application provides users with features such as cab search from service providers such as Ola, Taxiforsure, Meru etc.
The app can also be used for booking, tracking and rating of the cabs from the aggregators. Currently, it claims to have 1,20,000 organic users and handles around 1,00,000 search queries on a monthly basis. As per the company, it is providing services in 75 cities.
The startup has also announced the launch of first of its kind cab search and booking bot called ‘Robocab’. It has been programmed in a way that solves the most common pain point of cab users – the pain of seeing no cabs available during the peak morning and evening hours. It will pre-book cabs for the users based on their pre-defined time preferences, operators, type and pricing.
The company is said to be in the process of building a cross-vertical data gathering and analytics engine to predict the Indian user’s impulsive preference of road travel across multiple verticals including bike taxis, self-drive cars and cab offerings.
Pulkit Ahuja, co-founder of the company, describes, that 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.
Currently, the cab hailing service space is one of the most competitive segment in the India. Ola and Uber are the most popular cab booking service provider and are battling out to be at the pole position.
Recently, Ola, along with China’s Didi Kuaidi Joint Co., US-based Lyft and Singapore-based GrabTaxi, announced the global taxi alliance to collectively take on Uber, which has been single handedly playing them all in their individual territory.
