Despite all thats happening with Uber and Ola’s bike taxi services, one of the early-movers in this space Baxi, has today announced that it has achieved a major milestone in its growth. The company has now seen over 1L customers riding as pillions on its bikes, in a matter of 110 days.
And to continue its growth trajectory, the company has announced a new non-data app offering to its customers. With that non-data app, all customers that have an Android smartphone without a data connection can also use the new Baxi mobile app.
With this offering, the app is now claimed to be the first and only taxi-booking app in the world, let alone bike-taxi booking industry, that functions without a data pack or internet connection.
In terms of the user experience, this offline app will have the same user interface that the current mobile application has. Once downloaded, customers will be able to use the Baxi app and book a Baxi just as conveniently as before; the new advantage being that customers no longer have to rely on data packs.
In India, where there are 475M (million) smartphone users, of which only 175M users have data plans. Thus, looking at the stats, it looks that the new Baxi app is now accessible to 300M more people.
Commenting on this development, Manu Rana, co-founder and CTO of the company said,
At Baxi we wanted to find a way to reach out to the segment of the population that has smartphones but no data connection. And ensure that lack of Internet connection or data plan is not the reason for customers to not be able to avail Baxi’s services. With our new non- data Baxi app, we will now be able to make commuting easier for the maximum number of people.
The company is currently finalizing regulation requirements with the concerned government agencies to launch its service in Uttar Pradesh and is all set to launch in Noida and Ghaziabad at the end of the month.
Baxi, India’s first on-demand motorbike taxi company, launched its commercial services in Gurgaon on December 1, 2015. It was founded by Manu Rana and Ashutosh Johri, both 1995 batch alumni of IIT Delhi.
