Skip to main content

Indian scooter rental startup Bounce raises $150M

Big bucks are pouring to get you through chaotic traffic on Indian roads.

Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 17,000 electric and gasoline scooters in three dozen cities in India, has raised about $150 million as part of an ongoing financing round led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners India, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round, dubbed Series D, values the startup “well over $500 million,” the people said requesting anonymity. This is a significant increase since the five-year-old startup’s Series C financing round, which closed in June, when it was worth a little over $200 million.

A spokesperson of Bounce declined to comment.

Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, allows customers to rent a scooter for as little as Rs 15 (21 cents) an hour. Once the ride has been completed, customers can drop the scooter at any nearby parking spot.

The startup, which had raised $92 million prior to the new financing round, said last month that it had amassed 1.2 million customers.

The affordability of these rides is one of the selling points for smart electric and gasoline bikes in India. The other perk is the increasingly growing realization that two wheels warp through much faster in crowded traffic than four.

In this way, smart scooters are posing a challenge to Ola and Uber, both of which have invested billions of dollars to populate more than 100 cities with hundreds of thousands of cabs. In an interview with the New York Times, Bounce co-founder and chief executive Vivekananda Hallekere said earlier that “traditional”model of Uber and Ola is reaching its limits.

“You can’t make it affordable with a driver,” Hallekere told the Times. “And if users know how to use a scooter, why do you need a driver?”

Both Ola and Uber have taken notice.

Bounce competes with a handful of local players including Vogo, which is heavily backed by ride-hailing giant Ola, and Yulu, which maintains a partnership with Uber and closed an $8 million Series A funding this week.

Hallekere told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year that Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is working on building its own form factor for scooters.

India is the world’s largest market for two-wheelers. According to industry estimates, more than 200 million people have a license to ride a two-wheeler vehicle in the country. And about 20 million new motorcycles and scooters are sold in the nation each year.



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2OrNzxD
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill Gates steps down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy

In an announcement on Friday, Microsoft revealed that company co-founder Bill Gates has decided to step down from his role on its Board of Directors in order to focus on his philanthropic efforts at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This is Gate’s biggest change to his role at Microsoft since stepping down as company chairman in February 2014. According … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2We90Gu
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Play Doom – And More – On An NES

Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to include the NES even though the system definitely doesn’t have enough capability to run it without special help. And if you want your own Doom NES cartridge, this video will show you how to build it . We featured the original build from [TheRasteri] a while back which goes into details about how it’s possible to run such a resource-intensive game on a comparatively weak system. You just have to enter the cheat code “RASPI”. After all the heavy lifting is done, it’s time to put it into a realistic-looking cartridge. To get everything to fit in the donor cartridge, first the ICs in the cartridge were removed (except the lockout IC) and replaced with custom ROM chips. Some modifica...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Mini USB Keyboard That Isn’t A Keyboard

A useful add-on for any computer is a plug-in macro keyboard, a little peripheral that adds those extra useful buttons to automate tasks. [ Sayantan Pal] has made one, a handy board with nine programmable keys and a USB connector, but the surprise is that at its heart lies only the ubiquitous ATmega328 that you might find in an Arduino Uno. This isn’t a USB HID keyboard, instead it uses a USB-to-serial chip and appears to the host computer as a serial device. The keys themselves are simple momentary action switches, perhaps a deluxe version could use key switches from the likes of Cherry or similar. The clever part of this build comes on the host computer, which runs some Python code using the PyAutoGui library. This allows control of the keyboard and mouse, and provides an “in” for the script to link serial and input devices. Full configurability is assured through the Python code, and while that might preclude a non-technical user from gaining its full benefit it’s fair to say that ...
Post a Comment
Read more