Watch: Bounce co-founder Varun Agni on how IoT, Big Data power the shared mobility platform

By June this year, Bounce, the two-wheeler shared mobility platform owned by Wickedride Adventure Services, aims to have 10,000 scooters plying the roads in Hyderabad, its next market after home base Bengaluru.

The expansion plans will be fueled by a recent growth funding round that saw the company raise $97 million from existing investor B Capital, among several other investors. In all, Bounce has raised about $190 million till date and is valued at a reported $450 million.

Like most gig economy startups, Bounce’s fleet of dockless scooters rely heavily on technology at the backend to keep operations running round-the-clock. 

“It’s all technology. There is very little manual intervention that happens in the experience. Right from opening the app to ending the trip, there is nobody from Bounce that you would encounter,” Bounce co-founder and CTO Varun Agni told TechCircle in a recent interview. 

The company uses multiple data touchpoints, mostly through IoT (internet of things) sensors to derive insights, making the app as well as the vehicle user friendly and safe.

“There are data lakes that we form inside on which we do a lot of analysis and decide what bikes are good enough and which ones need intervention,” Agni said, adding that the company is also leveraging this data to tackle the problems of scooters being stranded on highways and miscreants misusing or damaging vehicles. 

Agni, an alumnus of the RV College of Engineering in Bangalore and the University of Maryland, in the US, founded Bounce in 2014 with Vivekanand Hallekere and Anil G. The initial business model was to offer motorcycles and scooters on a rental basis primarily to urban commuters. Later, the founders tweaked the business model to a dockless scooter-sharing service. In 2018, the company also expanded into the bicycle sharing space with the acquisition of the Indian assets of Chinese firm Ofo.