Raghunandan G and Aprameya Radhakrishna are what venture capitalists call experiential entrepreneurs. They experienced a pain point, came up with a solution, transformed it into an idea and started a venture that they hope will succeed.

As if to validate their idea, their venture – Taxi for Sure – has raised three rounds of institutional funding, apart from the seed capital that it got.

The two have been friends for over 15 years, from the time they were in engineering college. Both worked in the IT sector and then obtained an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad. Their paths diverged again, but there was one thing in common – both had to travel a lot as part of their work.

Their pain point was that whenever they needed a cab, they had no idea how long they would have to wait. Raghunandan and Aprameya realised this must be a common complaint for several others. The problem was not so much the availability of cabs, as the bottleneck in the call centres of the operators.

“What we realised was that there was a free car on the road which was ready to provide the service, there was a customer ready to avail himself of the service. Just because the call centre was the bottleneck, they were not able to get in touch with each other,” says Raghunandan.

They wanted do something to address this issue. Both quit their jobs and founded Taxi for Sure, which aims to make it easy for a customer to find a cab at his or her location without any wait. In the process, the cab driver also benefits in that he does not have to ply long distances for a pick up.

Their model does not depend too much on a call centre, but enables cab drivers and customers to interact directly through a mobile app. A call centre asks a customer for the pick up location and then finds if there are any cabs in the vicinity and allocates one. “Which is no rocket science. If you can provide a platform for customers to see cabs in their vicinity and provide a channel for them to interact with drivers directly, they themselves can do it,” says 32-year-old Raghunandan.

Tie-up with cab operators Taxi for Sure ties up with cab operators, getting a 10 per cent share of the fare from them when a customer has booked through it. Taxi for Sure has a call centre, but this is only for the first time a customer gets in touch with it. Subsequently, the customer is encouraged to download an app on his or her mobile phone and book a cab through the app.

The app has a GPS location sensor that gives the customer’s exact location. For drivers, Taxi for Sure provides them a GPS device – a ₹5,000 Micromax phone. The company has written an app that acts as a GPS device and as a communication tool. Using the phone, the customer can book a cab and the booking will go to the cab closest to the location. The cab driver can choose to accept or reject the booking. If more than one driver accepts the booking, the app figures out which driver has got the highest customer rating, who has done the maximum business for the day, who is the closest to the customer and who has been idle for long. After considering all these parameters, the app reverts to the customer about his or her booking.

“By the time the customer leaves his meeting room, the cab will be waiting for him. The cab driver doesn’t have to call because we would have shared the coordinates with the driver,” explains Raghunandan. This way, he says, Taxi for Sure avoids the call centre bottleneck that other operators face.

Institutional funding The venture has so far raised three rounds of funding, beginning with a seed round of about ₹5 crore in 2011-end from Accel Partners, Helion Ventures and Blume Ventures. It raised a Series A round of $3 million (₹20 crore) in April 2013 from the existing investors and $10 million (about ₹60 crore) in Series B in March with Bessemer participating. Subsequently, it raised an undisclosed amount in Series C funding from Accel USA.

It will use the money to expand to smaller cities so that it ties up with the maximum of cab operators before other players enter there.

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