Eight months after Bookmycab got a license to operate in Delhi NCR, it has been acquired by Pune based cab provider Wings Travels for an undisclosed amount, reports ET. Wings plans to expand its business to 47 new cities in India, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, according to the report, and strengthen its technology with this acquisition.
The combined entity will be called Wings Bookmycab, and will bring on board Bookmycab’s investors YourNest Angel Fund and Contrarian Drishti Partners as investors in Wings. Bookmycab was apparently exploring acquisition options with Jugnoo, which raised about $10 million in funding from Paytm in November 2015, but the deal did not go through. ET adds that Wings Travel provides transport for 10 lakh employees across 9 cities.
Wings Travels has several brands under its company: Wings Radio Cabs, Wings Premium and Ultra (luxury cars), Economy, Sakhi (driven by women, for women passengers), Ekab rentals, Bus Pool, Talk of the town, a quarterly magazine, Lanna Wellness, a spa in Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad and Wings Rainbow, a radio taxi service for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community in Mumbai, which will start operations next year.
In July 2015, Bookmycab’s Delhi NCR license lets it operate as an aggregator in the region. At that time, it claimed to have a license from Maharashtra government to provide cab services over phone or app and operated in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi-NCR and Hyderabad. It had plans to expand to Chennai, Bangalore and Pune.
Funding and acquisition: In November 2014, Bookmycab had acquired the Hyderabad-based online taxi booking service provider CabonClick to expand to Hyderabad. CabonClick was subsequently integrated into Bookmycab.com, with the former’s website redirecting to the latter along with its entire fleet and listings. The company received its first round of funding from YourNest Angel Fund and Mumbai Angels in July 2012.
Other local taxi developments:
– Earlier this month, Kerala’s local taxi operator body Ernakulam Car Drivers Welfare Society launched a Kerala Taxi app to let users book taxis online. The pilot project has 100 drivers and plans to add all the 3,000 taxi drivers in the Ernakulam district to the taxi booking app.
– In January, Radio taxi company Meru Cabs launched ridesharing features on the platform, starting with Delhi. In november 2015, it tied up with local AC taxis in Kolkata to make the latter available on its platform.
– In the same month, two of Mumbai’s taxi unions (the Mumbai Taxi Association & Mumbai Taximen’s Union) said that they were working on an app through which users could book black and yellow cabs, to be launched by January end.
– In December 2015, Cabsguru, a cab search, comparison and booking platform, raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding to strengthen its product. The company also launched a cab booking bot called Robocab within its app.
Also read:
– Amendment to MVA & infra focus to help transport companies
– Why Karnataka’s cab aggregator rules are good, bad and ambiguous
Image Credit: Thomas Hawk under CC BY NC 2.0
