Excl: Taxiguide Raises Angel Funding; Looking To Raise $2M In Series A Round

Taxiguide, an online car rental booking service, has raised Rs 25 lakh in angel funding from Anand R P, investment director at Squadron Capital. However, Anand made this investment in his personal capacity. The Bangalore-based startup was founded in April 2010 by Ashok Ananthakrishnan, Subash Bidare and Shashibushan Venkatasubbaiah.

"The capital raised will be used for expanding operations and meeting working capital requirements," said Ananthakrishnan. We are also looking for a series A round which would be around $2 million," he told Techcircle.in.

Taxiguide operates as a car rental aggregator, bringing together taxi operators and retail customers on one platform.

The company offers online car rental services across 75 cities and also enables customers to search for car rental/hire options in terms of operators, vehicle type and price. Next, customers can make online reservations for which they have to pay 20 per cent of the total amount at the time of booking. But for some local visits, users may be required to pay the entire amount upfront.

Users don't have to register on the site to use the booking service. They can also choose to reschedule the booking or cancel it altogether (there is a cancellation charge). The minimum transaction on the site is Rs 500 and it goes up to Rs 35,000 (or even more, depending on the duration of the trip).

The company competes with other car rental aggregators like Savaari Car Rentals Pvt Ltd (raised $1 million in a series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners recently), YourCabs.com (raised angel funding from Sprism Investment Pvt Ltd and others), Olacabs.com (raised series A funding from Tiger Global Management). Indeed, most of these firms raised their first or follow-on rounds of funding over the past one week.

The firm will use the angel round primarily as working capital but the proposed round of $2 million will be utilised for customer acquisition, hiring, improving the technology and marketing, said Ananthakrishnan.

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