Carzonrent integrates online cab rental platform Qcabs

Carzonrent India Pvt Ltd, which acquired online cab booking startup Qcabs early this year, has integrated the site with itself, thereby discontinuing the acquired brand. This is part of a strategy to create a cab booking platform for its mother brand, founder and CEO Rajiv Vij told Techcircle.in.

The company had acquired Sirius Mobile Works, which ran Qcabs.com, in May this year for an undisclosed amount. Qcabs was founded in 2011 by IIT-Delhi alumni Gaurav Dosi and Reshav Singla. Post the acquisition, Qcabs co-founders joined Carzonrent.

The Qcabs home page now redirects to Carzonrent website, which is now an integrated cab booking platform. The mother website also has a tab for its radio taxi service, which operates under the brand EasyCabs and has its own online booking site.

According to Vij, as an integrated online booking platform, Carzonrent is now clocking 400 transactions per day. "We believe that this online business has the potential to be as big as our total business currently and in three years it could be generating revenues of Rs 300-400 crore," he said.

Carzonrent is clocking revenues of Rs 25-30 crore per month, which gives it an annualised business of around Rs 300-330 crore, with 15 per cent margin. It has been growing its top-line at a CAGR of 35 per cent. However, till now the online booking accounted for only a negligible amount of the total.

Carzonrent as a platform is now competing with several startups that are essentially online cab booking aggregators including Olacabs, Savaari, YourCabs, TaxiGuide and TaxiForSure.

The firm is backed by SIDBI, WestBridge and BTS , which together have pumped in around Rs 100 crore in the firm.

The overall car rental industry in India is estimated to be worth around Rs 15,000 crore and growing 12-15 per cent a year. While some of the larger radio cab firms are PE backed, a number of new generation online cab booking aggregator platforms have raised angel funding or venture capital investment in the last one year.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)