Wings Travels acquires Bookmycab

Pune based Wings Travels wingstravel.in Management Pvt. Ltd, which provides staff transportation services, has acquired taxi services company Bookmycab for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will help Wings Travels expend into the radio taxi segment and strengthen its technological capabilities.

The merged entity will be rebranded as WingsTravels Bookmycab. It will be run by Mumbai based LiveMinds Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which owns Bookmycab. Wings Travels, which has been operating since 2001, primarily offered staff transports services to business process outsourcing firms. It has about 600 employees and offers its services in Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Nagpur, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad.

The acquisition will help Wings Travels to expand its services to 47 cities in India and offer its radio taxi services in Yangon (Myanmar), Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Vietnam. While its Yangon operations commenced about three months ago, the Thailand operations are likely to start from the first week of May. 

Jugnoo acquires Bistro and Yelo

India’s Jugnoo, a ten month old start up that has apps for both auto rickshaw rides and food delivery had acquired Bistro, a restaurant discovery app and Yelo, a services marketplace. The deal size of both the start-ups combined is said to be worth $1 Million in cash and stock.

With this acquisition, Jugnoo wants to strengthen its position in the hyper local service. Bistro, an eighteen month old startup, provides a DIY Platform for broadcasting offers and managing loyalty for restaurants. The app helps build, execute, and monitor customer engagement and brand loyalty campaigns. Yelo, a one year old startup offers a networking app for freelancers and part timers.

Jugnoo runs three apps- Jugnoo Autos, Jugnoo Meals, and Jugnoo Fatafat. The Jugnoo Autos app, started in November 2014, is like Uber for auto rickshaw rides. The other service is Jugnoo Meals, launched in February, which offers home delivery of freshly home cooked food with a rotational menu. The meals are cooked by Jugnoo in house chefs and are delivered within 30 minutes of placing the order.

Jugnoo launched Jugnoo Fatafat in April, a hyper local commerce marketplace for home delivery of fresh groceries. Earlier, Jugnoo acquired cab aggregator Bookmycab to enter the taxi aggregator space in bigger cities like Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Pune. After the acquisition, Jugnoo managed to cross 10,000 daily transactions. The startup secured $5 Million in seed funding from Snow Leopard and Paytm three months ago. It competes with Ola and Uber.

Carzonrent Buys Ridingo

Private Equity firm WestBridge Capital backed Carzonrent India Pvt. Ltd, which runs radio cab services besides offering self-drive car rental and fleet management services, has acquired Bangalore based 42 Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which runs a ride sharing app Ridingo for an undisclosed amount.

With the acquisition, Carzonrent expects ride share business to account for 75 per cent of its business in five years. It will continue to see the Ridingo brand name. New Delhi based Carzonrent, which started as a corporate leasing and Cab rental service provider in 2000 also owns Easy Cabs service and MYLES, a self-drive venture. Its car lease division has a fleet of about 2,000 cars and about 135 corporate clients. It is now focusing on the consumer side of business.

The company is backed by WestBridge Capital, BTS Advisors and SIDBI Venture, had together invested about Rs 80 crore for about 32 percent stake in 2012. Ridingo connects car owners to people looking for a ride within the city. At present, it claims over 8,500 registered users in Bangalore and enables over 400 trips per day.

In October last year, Japan Sumitomo Mitsui Auto service Co Ltd and Sumitomo Corporation through their joint venture firm SMAS auto Leasing India Pvt. Ltd, agreed to acquire the auto leasing business of Carzonrent for an undisclosed amount. At a global level, BlaBlaCar competes with Uber, which operates a carpooling service called UberPool in some markets. It is not available in India yet.

French BlaBlaCar enter in India

One of France biggest startups and amongst the world’s largest carpool companies wants to revolutionize the way Indians Travel. BlaBlaCar, the city-to-city ridesharing service available across Europe, Russia, and Turkey, has arrived in India on January 14, 2015. The company is opening its ninth office in the capital city and it had plans to expand into India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

As in its other 13 other markets in which over two million people use its service, BlaBlaCar lets drivers offers ride from one city to another, and share the cost with co-travelers who sign up for the journey making the trip more affordable than traveling separately. It has launched services in Delhi and Gurgaon on Wednesday. India is the first stop in Asia, for the 10-year-old company that has built an online community of 10 Million across 13 countries so far.

Last July, it received $100 Million in funding from a slew of investors including Accel Partners and Index Ventures, when it first announced its interest in emerging markets including India, Brazil, and Turkey. Unlike taxi aggregators who have been asked to register as radio taxi operators, carpooling services in India are not bound by regulation yet. Brazil Tripda, which is backed by German Incubator Rocket Internet, launched its Indian operations last November by offering ride sharing between cities. Meanwhile, a number of local players like RidingO, SmartMumbaikar, and ZingHopper, offer similar services in India.

BlaBlaCar, which draws its quirky name from one of the features that users display on their profile on the company’s platform, expects users to log in using their Facebook profile. They can often choose the driver they want to ride with based on profiles. In Spain, Poland, and France, BlaBlaCar charges an 11% commission on each ride per person. In India too, commuters will have to sign on through their Facebook profile, and book a ride with a driver they are likely to be comfortable with. While the service will be free for the first year, the company will later take a percentage out of every booking.