TaxiForSure in talks to raise over $100M from foreign PEs & hedge funds

Online taxi booking venture TaxiForSure.com, run by Bangalore-based Serendipity Infolabs Pvt Ltd, is in advanced talks with foreign PE investors and hedge funds to raise more than $100 million in its Series D round of funding, a top executive of the firm told Techcircle.in.

Existing investors, including Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, are also likely to participate in the round.

TaxiForSure, which currently operates in 37 cities including Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Baroda, will use the funds to expand its operations to 100 cities by June 2015.

"This round should be closed in a few weeks," said Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder of TaxiForSure. "A portion of the funds will also go towards technology enhancement."

The company was founded in June 2011 by Raghunandan G and Radhakrishna -- both engineering graduates from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (Surathkal). The duo also holds management degrees from IIM Ahmedabad.

Prior to starting TaxiForSure, Radhakrishna was head of business development at Jones Lang LaSalle (India). In the past, he had worked at Infosys. His partner Raghunandan had earlier worked as a consultant at Feedback Ventures.

TaxiForSure acts as an aggregator of car/cab rentals and its offerings include local point-to-point pick-up and drop, airport transfer, local packages (for four or eight hours) and outstation packages. Besides regular rentals, it also provides luxury cars like Rolls Royce Phantom, Hummer, Limousine, Jaguar, Audi A6, BMW 7 Series and Mercedes S class.

The company claims it does 35,000-40,000 transactions per day.

In August last year, TaxiForSure had raised an undisclosed amount in its Series C round of funding led by Accel Partners (the US), with participation from Bessemer and Accel. As per the news reports then, the company had received $30 million from this round.

A few months ago, Olacabs -- one of its closest competitors -- had raised $210 million in Series D round of funding led by SoftBank Corp, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global and Matrix Partners India, besides Steadview Capital. Google Ventures-backed Uber is another leading player in this space.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)