Uber
announced its exit from Southeast Asia last month in a deal that sees Grab
buy its
regional business, and since then a number of companies have stepped
into the void. Those include $4 billion-valued heavyweight Go-Jek, which
has held talks with top taxi operator ComfortDelGro, and newer names like Ryde and
U.S.-based Arcade City, but Jugnoo is perhaps even less expected.
Away from
the main stage fight between Ola and Uber in India, Jugnoo has quietly
buckled down and built a business that founder and CEO Samar Singla told
TechCrunch is profitable with around 10 percent of the country’s e-hailing
volumes. Key to that, he said, has been a focus on more rural areas of the
country and its B2B logistics service. Uber briefly ran a competing service
in 2015, while Ola is pushing its rickshaw offerings towards electric
vehicles.
Jugnoo plans
to take a unique approach in Singapore, where it will launch a car-on-demand
service that uses a “reverse-bidding” model. That’s a play on bidding systems —
which incentivize passengers to offer a tip to land a driver for their
requested journey — that instead lets drivers jostle to ‘win’ a passenger’s
journey. So a user makes a request to go from A to B, and then picks the driver
with the price — or perhaps car, or driver rating — that they prefer.
“Drivers
will bid so we hope it will be beneficial to consumers,” Singla said in an
interview, admitting that the system may need to be fine-tuned further down the
line. “Singapore customers are open, educated and understanding of startup
models.”
The company
was lured to Singapore as part of a government initiative to contact potential
ride-hailing services post Uber-Grab .
Jugnoo claims to have signed up over 100 drivers in the past two days, and it
is aiming to grow that number to at least 500 before the service launches.
“If we say
we will go and compete with Uber, Grab, Didi and others on their home turf and
with their money, that would be quite stupid,” the Jugnoo CEO explained. “We
think this could be a decent niche. Our goal is around 10 percent market
share [and] to be a sustainable company.”
The
opportunistic move will be Jugnoo’s first expansion outside of India. Singla is
optimistic that it can figure out alternative ways to compete in other parts of
the world, which could potentially include markets outside of Southeast Asia,
in the future.
Jugnoo has
taken $16 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase. Its
most recent raise was a $10 million Series B round that closed in 2016.
That’s small
pennies for Grab, which raised a round of more than $2 billion led by
SoftBank and Didi last year at a valuation of $6 billion. To date, the
Singapore-based firm has pulled in over $4 billion in capital from investors.
India’s Jugnoo adopts a unique take on ride-hailing to help fill Singapore’s Uber void
Reviewed by Anand Yadav
on
April 25, 2018
Rating:
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