After a stint of 18 years in the IT industry, Rajani Kasu joined the Indian School of Business for a PG in management before she began her maiden entrepreneurial venture.

A techie who had worked for Verizon Wireless and Verizon in various roles, Rajani set out fill a gap in the holiday travel segment.

“Ubers and Olas take care of your travel needs within the city. But I found that a majority of cabs available for inter-city weekend trips are hired from the largely unorganised small-time private cab services,” Kasu, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of online car rental service Zyppys, told BusinessLine .

She teamed up with her friend from her IT days, Madhu Raghunayakula, to set up the cab aggregation service that takes care of inter-city travel needs. Spending from their savings, the start-up built an IT platform to aggregate cabs from local service providers.

“We started operations in November 2015 in a handful of cities. Now, we offer our services in 44 cities with an aggregated fleet of 5,000 cabs. You don’t have to pay anything additional to the invoice we generate.”

Expansion The firm is planning to raise a seed fund of ₹5 crore in the next few weeks.

“We are planning to increase the network to 60 cities. We are going for a late funding in order not to dilute equity at an early stage. The second round will happen after two years. We might raise ₹30 crore in that round,” she said.

Raghunayakula, the Chief Operating Officer, said the firm was in the process of building a network of service providers to offer value-added services along the journey.

“We will provide contextual information on hotels, hospitals and places of tourist interest,” he said.

Weekend trips that generally run into a few hundred kilometres give drivers an assured income as against the hassle in the cities where they scrambled for trips to earn a decent sum, Kasu said.

The start-up claims to have covered a total distance of 27 lakh kilometres.

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