JustRide, a self-drive car rental marketplace, has raised $3 million in bridge funding from Susa Ventures, Kima Ventures, Axan Ventures, SCM Holdings, IT-Farm, Y Combinator partners Justin Kan, Qasar Younis and Paul Buccheit, reports Economic Times. Note that JustRide was a part of Y Combinator’s summer batch in July this year and got $120,000 from the accelerator for a 7% stake in the company.
JustRide will use the funds for JustConnect, the car sharing platform, Yabber, an IoT device for driving skills analysis and scale its fleet to 2,000 cars from the current 300. It plans to add 300 cars monthly for the next 6 months. According to the report, JustRide has an annual GMV of $3.5 million and net revenues of $1.5 million as of now.
The company charges a refundable deposit of Rs 1000 for confirming the user’s booking and charges Rs 9-15 per km on excess kms driven on a limited kms package, depending on the booked car. Interestingly, JustRide does not provide reimbursement if the car breaks down but will provide the user with another can when available if the car can’t be repaired immediately. It adds that, “The replacement car provided depends on the discretion of the management and is subject to availability.”
It is present in Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore and operates by either asking people to attach their cars to its platform or by leasing cars and providing a commission on those leases. Earlier this year, JustRide hired Bharath PN as its executive director of operations. Bharath PN was formerly the COO of JustRide’s rival Zoomcar.
Previous funding
In July last year, JustRide raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Alok Mittal, Niraj Singh, Nikunj Jain, Zishaan Hayath, Punit K Goyal, Anirudh Damani, Rohit Chokhan, and Palaash Ventures. In December, it raised $50,000 in equity free seed funding from Google as a part Google Launchpad, the startup accelerator platform.
Competition
In August this year, Zoomcar raised $24 million from Ford Smart Mobility LLC with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Nokia Growth Partners and Empire Angels. Zoomcar said it would use the funds for scaling its Zoomcar Associate Program (ZAP), the marketplace model and on technology.
