Rapido's rapid rise: How the start up is looking to challenge duopoly of Ola and Uber

Two and three wheeler taxi company Rapido, which recently entered the cab hailing business to take on the duopoly of Ola and Uber, said that currently the focus of the company is on growth, which will be fundamentally centered around leveraging existing infrastructure to cater to more people without compromising on convenience or safety.

“By expanding our operations to different cities, we seek to learn from diverse user reactions to our offerings. Our focus is on understanding how our services are impacting them, determining if it's genuinely beneficial, and creating a broader positive impact on the communities we serve. This approach ensures that as we grow, we stay attuned to the evolving needs of our users and continue to refine our services to deliver meaningful value,” Rishikesh SR, co founder, Rapido said.

He adds that profitability for any business is integral to its growth. “We completely understand that but our ultimate objective is to enable, in whatever way we can, mobility solutions that add value to our captains and consumers. Rapido has always been in this unique position of being a low cost player.

We are already operationally profitable with our latest cab service offerings, and we are providing the lowest price for our cabs without discounts,” he said. “The reason we are able to do that is because as low cost players, we can sustain our company with lower margin structures.” According to Aravind Sanka, another co founder of Rapido, one of the key areas that they want to majorly focus on is making affordability a central aspect of their services.

“We aim to explore new vehicle segments and provide more personalized commute solutions tailored to the specific needs of passengers. Our goal is to ensure that transportation remains accessible to a wide range of individuals, offering a diverse and inclusive range of options that cater to varying economic circumstances,” he said.

Sanka adds that apart from offering last mile connectivity, the company is also looking at parking infrastructure solutions where we can try and combine the entire commute experience, so that a single ticket can get individuals from the metro to the last mile. “Having one of the largest distribution networks in the entire country, we want to leverage it in a way that allows us to strategically expand into logistics.

Especially in the case of Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, there is a lot more scope to bring about a transformative change in the way people travel, and transport goods,” he adds. He says that to offer a full gamut of mobility solutions in a market like India, each city needs to be looked at differently.

“While in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, and Delhi, people travel by cabs, the case is very different for cities like Faridabad, Aurangabad, Patiala or Jabalpur. People in those cities travel in unconventional tempo vans or mini vans. So, our team started to craft different solutions for different cities based on their unique transport ecosystem,” he said.

For Rishikesh SR, it’s all about solving the dilemma around convenience vs affordability. “What we have been consistently trying to do since we started working on building Rapido is to create viable, convenient, and affordable solutions that directly address the issues of the everyday individual.

With factors like footboarding on buses still prevalent, our motive is to simplify commuting, contextualizing the unique mobility requirements of each city, and addressing it one step at a time,” he said..