Murugappa family, Formula 1 racer Karan Chandok invest in scooter rentals startup
They get over 5,000 orders a month and see a significant percentage coming from short trips and on weekdays
Moneycontrol News
Bangalore-based scooter rental startup Vogo Automotive has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding led by Murugappa family, Formula 1 racer Karan Chandhok and others.
The tech-based bike rentals company will use the funds to build an automated technology platform, expanding its tech team, and to escalate marketing efforts, the company said in a statement.
For now, the startup has launched an automated pickup and drop scooter rental platform, which will allow users to get the bike key, unlock remotely, using a simple one-time password. Like other car-rental startups such as Zoomcar and Myles, Vogo too has engineered the vehicles with IoT sensors transmitting a plethora of real-time data on usage, vehicle health, fuel level, and so on.
Launched with a focus on targeting the student population, the company is present in student-heavy cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Manipal, and Mysore.
“We started out by identifying an early adopter segment, college students. Now more than 15,000 students across 15 colleges and four cities use Vogo. We see them moving towards bike, replacing taxis and autos,” CEO of Vogo, Anand Ayyadurai said.
They get over 5,000 orders a month and see a significant percentage coming from short trips and on weekdays.
The company plans to scale this automated system across hundreds of pickup and drop locations in each city and raise a large institutional round in the coming months to build a large pan-India network.
Vogo’s direct competitor – Grabhouse incubated Wheelstreet – is already operational in more than 18 cities including Pune, Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Kolkata, Darjeeling, Jaipur, and Hyderabad.
The company was founded in 2016 by IIT-Bombay and IIM-Ahmedabad alumni Anand Ayyadurai, Padmanabhan Balakrishnan, and Sanchit Mittal.
The company has also announced its plans to go pan-India soon. The startup has raised about Rs 3.4 crore from two funding rounds, in addition to an undisclosed amount raised in a third round.
