Know How This Startup Is Curbing Travel Expenses By 45% An online platform to search, compare and book outstation one-way and round trip cabs.
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The transportation industry is swiveling and several players have leveraged this growing market to build large companies. Currently, the cab vendors offer one-way with roundtrip fare as they cannot predict return booking. The journey often ends with arguments and dispute on km-based pricing. Moreover, women safety and reliability is a constant problem. Hence the one-way market's growth is stuck.
Sensing the opportunity Sunil Chaula and Nilesh Pawaskar founded Wiwigo, an online platform to search, compare and book outstation one-way and roundtrip cabs.
The startup disrupts the current model and it helps passenger to save almost 45 per cent of current fares.
Started in April 2015, Wiwigo organizes the otherwise fragmented and disorganized Inter-city travel space "We aggregate demand on the either cities of a route and provide back-to-back bookings to our fleet, bringing down the cost to customer by up to 50 per cent. With the growing number of drivers and vehicles, we shall be able to introduce Power Smart Pricing for customers in near future. This would enable further saving of 20 per cent for the customers. Our proposition is unique, and our vision clear," said Sunil Chaula, Founder and CEO at Wiwigo.
Money Rolling In:
Recently startup has bagged Rs. 4 crore funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN) and 2 HNIs. IAN Investors, Priyank Shankar Garg & Harsh Chitale have led the funding round. Priyank Shankar Garg will join the board of Wiwigo to mentor the team for fast growth.
Their current fundraise from IAN will help them expand its operations to over 100 cities by the end of current year, making it one of the fastest growing companies.
Speaking on the investment, Priyank Shankar Garg, the IAN lead investor said, "The Inter-city travel sector is flooded with vendors and private taxi services, yet it remains fragmented and unorganized. This segment is rife with opportunity for vastly better customer experiences. We are extremely excited to support Wiwigo which is well poised with its safe to use, convenient, and cost-effective platform. The team is determined, driven and customer oriented and aptly supported by great execution skills to build a profitable venture around a scalable ecosystem of vendors, OTAs and other travel service providers."
Offering /Services
Wiwigo offers the only convenient (door-to-door) price competitive and time efficient alternative. The company is unlocking the potential market enabling with technology and innovation.
Right from customer booking to vendor bidding and driver selection, car confirmation, car tracking, journey alerts and customer feedback, the entire process is managed with automated workflows. These actions are monitored and managed by Wiwigo team through operations admin panel. Most bookings are already being fulfilled through the automated system.
Future plans
Wiwigo has ongoing contracts with large OTAs to serve their customer base for holiday packages and last mile connectivity. Startupwas able to secure these contracts for the quality of service the company is able to provide at competitive price due to their comprehensive network and scalability of operations.
"We are doing one-way journeys for major destinations in India already. The response from metro cities has been incredible and growing at a fast pace. We aim to revolutionize the inter-city travel in the country making ourselves the most preferred taxi booking platform in India," said Nilesh Pawaskar, Co-Founder and CMO, Wiwigo.
The startup has seen a great traction since its inception in 2015. The company is growing at the rate of 30 per cent month-on-month on every metric. Wiwigo's services are available in more than 40 cities in India; including Delhi, Bangalore and Pune. The company currently has 5000 cabs across category starting from a Maruti to a Rolls Royce. It has served around 25000 customers till date through its network of 1200 active vendors across India.
Sector Overview
The intercity car rental market in India is approximately $9 billion and it's growing at 12 per cent CAGR. Around 90 per cent of this market is unorganized and highly fragmented. If we look at the figures stated by Ministry of Transport, it estimates that inter-state passenger taxi revenue was around $3.5 billion in 2012. The company estimates that one-way taxi target market is roughly around $550 million.
The inter-city taxi market is 90 per cent unorganized, and dominated by offline agents, and this startup aims to standardize it while adding value to the customers.
