Orahi sees the college crowd driving car-pooling segment

With college-goers now owning cars, car-pooling platform Orahi is set to offer its services to the student segment in the Delhi-National Capital Region by August. The company, which caters to the corporate segment, currently, has 85,000 users.

Next year, it plans to launch its services in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.

“Our market research, done by a 32-member team, showed that 32 per cent of the college-going crowd now own cars, against 36 per cent car-owners in our system. So, we hope the college crowd will adopt our services fast,” Arun Bhati, COO, Orahi, told BusinessLine .

There are around 54 lakh working professionals in Delhi-NCR and 7-8 lakh students in Delhi, he said.

The company says some of its users earn up to ₹4,000-5,000 a month, which, the company feels, will help drive adoption of car-pooling.

“When we started in 2013, we did a market research with a sample of 2,000 people across metros in India, apart from Vietnam and Canada, to identify the problems in commuting,” he said.

Bhati says the research revealed three issues. First, people wanted flexibility, as they feared that co-passengers might leave at different times. To deal with this, the company split the trips into two, allowing users to tie up with different pooling partners.

Second, people had concerns over finding people in their vicinity and also wanted to identify car-owners in their time zone.

To deal with this, a request-and-response is routed between end-users through Orahi servers, subject to the stakeholders being comfortable.

Third, Orahi realised that people, especially in India, were not comfortable with the idea of handing over cash for such travel, unlike in the UK and Canada. To deal with this, Orahi built its own wallet system for registered members.

Passengers and car-owners have a wallet mechanism with Orahi, either through credit card, debit card or Net banking.

A passenger pays a flat rate of ₹3.5/km at the end of trip, out of which 50 paise goes to Orahi. The company transfers the money to the car-owner once a month. Users have to top up their Orahi wallet with a minimum of ₹200, which has unlimited validity, Bhati said.

Orahi launched a three-tier verification system, especially to ensure safety of women. To be an Orahi user, apart from a government ID proof, people should have a corporate account and a corporate e-mail ID, to be verified through an OTP sent to the mobilephone. Users on the platform can view each other’s home and office addresses, and the ratings of the last six rides.

Sameer Khanna, CEO and founder, Orahi, said the company plans to expand to the five cities in the first calendar quarter of 2017. The company, which raised $520,000 from the India Angel Network, is looking to raise Series A funding for expansion. “Majority of the funds will be used for marketing while some will be used for software as well,” Bhati said.

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