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Ride-sharing firm BlaBlaCar raises $200 million
18 Sep 2015
  • Comuto SA, which owns ride-sharing service provider BlaBlaCar, has raised $200 million at a valuation of $1.6 billion in a Series D funding round from Insight Venture Partner, Lead Edge Capital and Vostok New Ventures.



  • BlaBlaCar, which started services in 2006 as an inter-city ride sharing service, had earlier raised more than $110 million in three rounds, the last being a $100 million round from Index Venture partners, Accel Partners and Lead Edge Capital in July last year.

  • The company entered India in January, while Ola and Uber were fighting it out in the intra-city online taxi aggregation market segment.

  • BlaBlaCar, however, facilitates long distance ride sharing, the most prevalent use case being car owners travelling between cities offering empty seats to another co-traveller. This enables the car owners to share the cost with co-passengers while a traveller who avails of the service gets to travel at a lesser price, as against availing of a public transport like a train or a bus.

  • BlaBlaCar charges the co-traveller a commission.

  • The company is present in 19 countries including France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the UK. India is its only presence among the Asian countries. The company claims to have 20 million riders globally.

  • The India business has grown substantially in the last six months, and about 350,000 seats have been shared across 700 cities in these six months, said Raghav Gupta, country manager, BlaBlaCar.

  • Car pooling as a concept has not taken off in India. SoftBank-backed Ola is considering launching a similar service, but within city limits, while Meru Cabs has already launched one earlier this month. A number of ride-sharing services such as Ridingo, Taxeeta, sRide and CarEgiri have come up recently, but no one has been successful in scaling up the business.

 

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