Bike taxi startup Rapido’s valuation shoots up in new funding round

Roppen Transportation Services Pvt. Ltd, which operates bike taxi startup Rapido, is raising up to $11.19 million (Rs 78.23 crore at current exchange rates) in fresh funding from a clutch of new and existing investors.

New investor Nexus Venture Partners is leading the investment with an infusion of $6.53 million (Rs 45.64 crore), according to Bengaluru-based Rapido’s filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

As per TechCircle estimates, Rapido is raising the fresh round at a post-money valuation of around $56-58 million (Rs 391-405 crore). This represents more than a four-fold jump from its last-known valuation of $13.18 million (Rs 93 crore).

The other investors in the round include Hong Kong-based multi-strategy private investment firm Integrated Capital, which is an existing backer. Individual investors, whose credentials TechCircle could not verify immediately, also contributed.

US-based entity Rapido Holdings LLC is also investing $2.12 million (Rs 14.82 crore) in this round. It could not be immediately ascertained whether this is an associate firm of Rapido.

Email queries sent to Rapido did not elicit a response till the time of publishing this report.

Rapido

Founded by Rishikesh SR, Pavan Guntupalli and Aravind Sanka, Rapido currently operates in Bengaluru and Delhi. It allows users to book bike rides for solo trips via a mobile app that can be accessed in multiple languages such as Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and English.

In January this year, Rapido raised $10 million (Rs 71 crore) in a Series A funding round led by Integrated Capital. Existing investors Skycatchr, AdvantEdge and Astarc Ventures also contributed to that round.

In 2017, Rapido had raised $750,000 from investors including Hero MotoCorp chairman Pawan Munjal, former Google India managing director Rajan Anandan and Astarc Ventures, according to Edge, the data research platform of Mosaic Digital, which owns TechCircle.

In September 2017, Rapido mopped up Rs 2.75 crore from US-based Battery Road Digital Holdings LLC and other investors.

The company had acquired Hyderabad rival Getbike to enter the business-to-business segment in May last year.

Dozens of bike taxi startups had launched operations across various states in the past two years but many of them shut down owing to lack of funding, operational challenges and regulatory hurdles.

In March, Rapido’s bike taxis were impounded for allegedly flouting the Karnataka transport department’s rules .