Rapido (Roppen Transportation Services Private Limited) is a bike taxi app founded by AravindSanka in the year 2015 which offers nline commuters to book bike rides from their current location to their desired locations at affordable prices and in the quickest time possible.
This is the India’s largest and first bike taxi app which proved to be a great success.
Funding So far
The total funding amount for this app $19.4M.
Problem Solved:
It is a platform where people can book two wheelers at very reasonable prices. It also provides a huge opportunity to the two wheeler owners (with proper driving license and driving skills) to earn some amount in their spare time. This app even succeeded because people in metropolitans were tired of booking cabs for smaller distances at higher rates when were alone. This app has its presence registered in seven different states and many major cities including Bengaluru, Mysuru, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Vishakhapatnam (Vizag), Vijayawada, Tiruchirappalli (Trichy), Madurai, Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Surat and Patna. Gradually this app has become India’s largest growing bike booking app. Being an Indian startup, it has a better customer care services and hence is recognized more by people. The partner who offers ride on this app is known as a captain. Becoming a captain is again a very easy process and one just need to download the rapido captain app from googleplaystore on their Smartphone’s and then just upload the required documents like driving license, RC, insurance, photograph etc. Once verified, one can log in to the app as per his flexibility and offer rides. It provides a huge competition to the Indian – based online cab service providers, ola cabs.
But in the state of Karnataka, these online bike taxi service providers are facing a lot of problems. Earlier ola cabs was banned and their license was suspended for six months and was fined a total amount of around INR fifteen lakh. Now the state government is looking to ban this app also and according to Gnanendra Kumar, joint commissioner (Enforcement), the government has already seized more than 170 rapido bike taxis by Friday (5 april 2019). The additional commissioner of transport, NarendraHolkar added to these reports that a notice with a guidance of stopping these bike taxi services in the state has been drafted to rapido’s head office. According to the transport department of the state, they have posted letters to both ola and rapido to stop their bike taxi services as acc to a report in july 2018, the number of lives lost in road accidents in the cty reached 3250 and the number of bike accidents were on its max. the state transport department was still not agreeing to grant these companies the license to run two wheelers as a taxi.
After facing such problems in the state for operating as a bike taxi service providers, Ani technologies, the parent company of ola, filed a petition in the high court of Karnataka against the state transport department for the same cause.
