Amid growing competition in the Auto aggregation segment, Chandigarh-based on-demand auto rickshaw aggregator Jugnoo, has today announced that it has raised an additional $5 million in its Series B round from existing investor Paytm.
This brings the total amount raised in this round to $10 million. The company had earlier raised capital worth around $5.5 million from Snow Leopard and Rocketship.vc in the same round.
Jugnoo will primarily deploy this additional capital to scale up its business and expand to other cities in India. It will also spend amount to improve driver efficiency.
Samar Singla, CEO and co-founder of Jugnoo, said,
We will invest these funds in improving our driver efficiency and increasing our numbers in cities where we are currently in the growing phase. And with the kind of impact we have been able to make at the grass-roots, I am sure we have a long way to go.
Jugnoo was founded by Samar Singla and Chinmay Aggarwal in November 2014. It targets masses that are dependent on public transport for their daily conveyance. The company offers a bunch of services ranging from goods delivery, logistics, and transport.
Steadily, the company has been expanding services to other cities in India. Currently, it is present in 29 cities and claims to have a user base of 120 million. It has a network of over 10,000 auto-rickshaw drivers across India.
The startup had raised $5 million in Series A funding from Snow Leopard Technology Ventures and Paytm in July last year. It recently raised funding from actress Saumya Tandon and also signed her as the brand ambassador.
Commenting about the investment, Kiran Vasireddy, senior vice-president, Paytm, said,
Their [Jugnoo] auto hailing service has picked up phenomenally well and they are witnessing incredible growth MoM (month-over-month) basis. With further infusion of funds, Jugnoo will be equipped to scale up its operations across the country and Paytm is happy to be a part of its growth story.
This investment comes at a time, when Ola has been aggressively expanding its own auto-rickshaw offering and is claiming to have seen decent growth in the segment.The company in fact recently expanded its offering to 12 more cities within India. The service was already available in around 24 cities where there are over 3 million auto-rickshaws, with Ola claiming to do well over 30 million rides every single day.
Jugnoo had earlier announced plans to start operations in around 1000 villages of India and by the end of this year, it is planning to start operating in many more villages.
