Wiwigo.com, an inter-city taxi service provider, has raised Rs. 4 crore funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN), the world’s largest network of angel investors, and 2 HNIs.
The transportation industry is swiveling and several players have leveraged this growing market to build large companies. Wiwigo, is an online platform for intercity travel by cab –addressing the expensive the one-way trip problem. Wiwigo disrupts the current model and is passenger friendly to help them save almost 45% of current fares. With presence in over 40 cities, Wiwigo offers roundtrip and multi-city travel options. 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.
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.
The intercity car rental market in India is approximately $9 Billion USD and it’s growing at 12% CAGR. Around 90% of this market is unorganized and highly fragmented. As per Ministry of Transport figures, estimated inter-state passenger taxi revenue was around $3.5 Billion USD in 2012. The company estimates that one-way taxi target market is roughly around $550 Million USD*.
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.
Wiwigo offers the only convenient (door-to-door) price competitive and time efficient alternative. The company is unlocking the potential market enabling with Technology & 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.
Wiwigo has ongoing contracts with large OTAs to serve their customer base for holiday packages and last mile connectivity. Wiwigo was 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.
Built 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%. The inter-city taxi market is 90% unorganized, and dominated by offline agents, and we aim to standardize it while adding value to the customers. 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% for the customers. Our proposition is unique, and our vision clear. The support from IAN has been great as the leads not only mentored us but also gave us industry insights and tactics to curb the prevailing issues.”Sunil Chaula, Founder & CEO at Wiwigo said.
“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.” Commented Nilesh Pawaskar, Co-Founder & CMO at Wiwigo.
Priyank Shankar Garg, the IAN lead investor who is also joining the board commented on the investment saying, “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.”
Wiwigo has seen a great traction since its inception in 2015. The company is growing at the rate of 30% month-on-month on every metric. Wiwigo’s services are available in 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.
