15 December, 2015, New Delhi: New Delhi based cab search, comparison and booking platform Cabsguru, owned by Nohup Technologies Private Limited has raised angel capital from a group of investors at a 3.5 Million Dollar valuation. The investment round is led by Prashanth Ranganathan, founder and CEO of Paysense and former Head of Product, APAC for PayPal. Prashanth had previously founded Truvie Security (sold to PayPal in 2011) and cofounded SayNow Inc (sold to Google in 2010).
Cabsguru was founded by Vikash Singh and Pulkit Ahuja. Vikash ideated and launched Cabsguru last year. Before Cabsguru, he has helped many top MNC clients launch successful products across the globe. Pulkit Ahuja, author of two books including entrepreneurial bestseller ‘Googled by God’ and former founder of Unlockar Apps. In his latest assignment, Pulkit was leading the Product & Strategy Group at ORIX Auto Infrastructure Services, India as the Head of Innovation. Assisting the founding team in their journey as a part of their advisory board is the team of INSEAD Angels including Dharmendra Yashovardhan, former cofounder of ixigo (acquired by SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip), Rishab Malik, cofounder of droom and former Operating Partner of GSF Accelerator, and Devneet Bajaj, founder and CEO of M.I.T.R.A.
On Monday, Cabsguru announced that it has pioneered and launched a first of its kind multiple cab operator cab search and booking bot called Robocab. “Robocab has been programmed to solve the most common pain point of today’s cab users – the pain of seeing No Cabs Available on your cab app screens during the peak morning and evening hours when you need your cabs the most”,Vikash says.
Pulkit reveals that, “The idea of Robocab came to life after going through the same problem on a daily basis. Robocab ensures that the Cabsguru users don’t have to sit and keep juggling between different cab apps like Ola, Uber, Taxi For Sure, Meru and Easy Cabs during rush hours until they find a cab.” Robocab handles this for the users based on their predefined preference of time, cab operator, cab type and surge pricing. “Robocab’s backend design is based upon the algorithmic trading of stocks, the only difference being that instead of buying stocks, Robocab indulges in booking cabs based on a selected set of rules defined by the user.”, adds Pulkit.
The fresh funds would be used by the company to further strengthen their product and cause the next wave of disruption in India’s road travel space by bringing innovation and efficiency at both the demand and supply sides of the ecosystem. The company is also in the process of building a cross-vertical data gathering and analytics engine that is being designed to predict the Indian user’s impulsive preference of road travel across multiple verticals including bike taxis, self-drive cars and cab offerings from various cab providers.
Founded in 2014, Cabsguru has expanded itself to 75 cities and has emerged to be the only third party app that is providing end users with the complete end to end ecosystem starting from a single search for multiple cab providers like Ola, Taxi For Sure, Meru, Easy Cabs, Mega Cabs, Yo Cabs, Tab Cab, etc., to the booking, tracking and rating of cabs of these cab aggregators directly from the Cabsguru app.
