BENGALURU: Bike-taxi platform Rapido, which recently raised $180 million in a Series-D round, has grown 2.5x to pre-pandemic levels. Its valuation has crossed $830 million, and with the next round of funding, the Swiggy-backed start-up will enter the unicorn club.
“We don’t chase for that, and whenever it comes, we take it. We, as a company, have not been focusing on valuations. Closer from the number point of view, we don’t know when that will happen,” Aravind Sanka, co-founder, Rapido, told TNIE.
It has over 25 million customers and over 1.5 million driver partners. Rapido aims to serve over 50 million customers by the end of this year. It does close to 20 million orders per month, and there are 5% women riders and nearly 20% women customers.
When Rapido was launched seven years ago, the bike taxi culture was something new to India, as the bike concept, sitting behind a stranger did not exist. After building the culture, Rapido is now present in 100 cities.
Rapido’s core user segment is youngsters between the age group of 20 and 35 years, and it is also working on ways to attract 50-55 years old to make use of bike rides. While it took them some years to build the bike taxi category, the auto category that they entered during the second Covid wave, took just a year to onboard drivers. “We were able to do 50% of what we were doing in the bike taxi within one year,” said Sanka.
Apart from bike taxi and auto categories, Rapido is also into logistics- delivering food and groceries. Bike taxi is its core category, as 60% of its business comes from it, 30% from autos and 10% from delivery. Rapido has also partnered with food delivery platforms such as Swiggy and grocery major BigBasket, among others. Recently, the start-up has also partnered with TVS Motor Company.
“We started the delivery category before Covid. But during the lockdown period, we saw the mobility business taking time to recover and we doubled down on the delivery initiative. We scaled more than five times compared to the pre-pandemic level,” said Rapido co-founder, adding that they are focusing on first mile and last mile connectivity.
Segments in which Rapido offers services
Apart from bike-taxi and auto categories, Rapido is also into logistics- delivering food and groceries. Bike-taxi is its core category, as 60% of its business comes from it, 30% from autos and 10% from delivery