Naspers leads fresh investment in shared mobility platform Quick Ride

Bengaluru-based Quick Ride, which operates a mobile app for car and bike pooling services, has raised $14.3 million (Rs 100.78 crore at the current exchange rate) in a fresh funding round from existing investors, according to a media report.

iDisha Info Labs Pvt. Ltd, which operates Quick Ride, raised this sum from South African technology conglomerate Naspers as well as investment firms Sequoia India and Venture Highway, Inc42 reported citing the company’s filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

Naspers led the round with an infusion of $8.2 million (Rs 57.61 crore) while Sequoia and Venture Highway accounted for the rest.

Inc42 said that the investment was part of Quick Ride’s Series B round, adding that the company had earlier raised an undisclosed sum in Series A funding from the same set of investors.

E-mail queries sent to Quick Ride founders KNM Rao, Naveen Mamgain and Shobhana BN seeking clarity did not yield a response till the time of publishing this report.

Quick Ride was founded in 2015. The four-year-old startup offers a mobile app that helps in finding options for carpooling and bikepooling in real time.

Users can share their empty car or bike seat with colleagues or other professionals based on a match with commuters on the same route. As per information on its website, the company claims to have more than 1.3 million customers and has facilitated more than 14 million rideshares through its platform.

Quick Ride is currently operational in nine cities -- Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Kolkata. 

The company claims that its ride partners include users who are from major IT firms such as Cisco, IBM, Philips, Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, Capgemini, Mphasis and Tech Mahindra, among others.

Quick Ride competes with the ride-sharing options offered by both Ola and Uber. However, the two ride-hailing majors onboard driver partners with commercial cab licences while Quick Ride offers an enabling platform for private-vehicle owners looking to save on their commuting expenses.

Developments in the segment

• February 2019: Carmaker Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd entered the shared mobility space with an electric vehicle-based ride-hailing service called Glyd.
• April 2018: New Delhi-based intra-city bike- and carpooling startup Pooltoo, headed by three women entrepreneurs, raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Devika Ganesh, a high-net-worth individual.
• April 2018: Office commute automation platform MoveInSync raised $8 million (Rs 52 crore then) in a Series B round of funding led by homegrown venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners.