While intra-city cab travel has improved massively in India — thanks to Uber, inter-city cab commute continues to remain a pain. And thats largely because of the fact, that riders have to pay both way fares, even though commuting is once. To address that issue and capture this complex, but lucrative market, we are now seeing a flurry of inter-city cab aggregator startups coming up, and getting funded.
The latest to join this growing list is Wiwigo, which has bagged a₹ 4 crore seed round from Indian Angel Network. IAN Investors, Priyank Shankar Garg and Harsh Chitale have led the funding round. The former of them, will join the board.
The startup, works as an online platform which helps you book inter-city cabs and pay just one-way fares. With the current model, Wiwigo claims to be helping passenger, save as much as 45% of current fares across 40 cities. This fresh cash burst will help the startup expand operation to over 100 cities by end of this year.
The market opportunity is huge. Intercity car rental market in India is approximately $9 billion and it’s growing at 12% CAGR. Most of it however is fragmented, unorganised and unregulated. Official Government figures estimate the revenues from this market to be somewhere around $3.5 Billion.
With Wiwigo, the entire process of booking a cab becomes automated — both for the rider as well as the driver. The reason why inter-city cab operators usually charge both-way fares, is largely because of the unpredictable nature of this domain — whether there will be a return booking or not. Wiwigo, with its all-automated platform, makes sure you pay half of the price you would normally pay and operators get a return booking by leveraging the platform’s network.
Another edge with the startup has, is its door to door travel option. Not many in the market are offering such a feature. You can also track your cab, get journey alerts and customer feedback on the platform itself. Most of the ride-matching is done via Wiwigo’s automated platform, and all of these actions are monitored and managed by the company through operations admin panel.
