The new entity will be called Moving Tech Innovations Ltd, and is currently being headed by Juspay’s chief growth officer Shan M S and chief product officer Magizhan Selvan.
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Shan and Selvan are fully transitioning to the newly-set-up entity and will be running the firm, though they are yet to take up official designations, Shan told ET in an interaction. The new entity has been operational from March 1, 2024.
Juspay has a majority holding in the new entity, with its founders and senior managers also holding stakes. The entity does not have any external investors on its cap table currently, but is in talks with potential investors to raise its seed round of funding, Shan said.
“Though we are talking to investors, the idea is not to build yet another mobility business. We want to focus on a UPI-like model that will solve for cost and improve customer experience, while ensuring sustainability,” he added.
The firm has turned “operationally profitable” in Bengaluru– its biggest market with well over 30,000 drivers — inclusive of costs like map services, cloud costs, and city-specific driver and customer services cost, Shan added. The firm is yet to break even at a company level, inclusive of costs like engineering and marketing. It is now looking to turn profitable in new cities it expands to in a 12- to18-month period, while turning profitable at a company level in the next three to four years, he added.
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Namma Yatri has 100 full-time employees and a similar number of contracted employees for things like customer services. It is available in 8 cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kolkata. In Bengaluru, the firm is now looking to expand from auto to cab services. The firm competes with the likes of Uber, Ola and Rapido in the ride-hailing business, employing over 2.6 lakh drivers across the country. It expanded to Delhi in January this year.
On August 22, ET reported that Namma Yatri had started charging subscription fees from drivers in Bengaluru. On March 12, we reported on changes in the ride-hailing ecosystem as firms like Namma Yatri and Rapido tried out structures different from the ones used by incumbents like Ola and Uber.
Swiggy-backed ride-hailing platform Rapido has introduced a subscription fee model for its driver partners on cabs and autos, doing away with the old structure of commissions on rides, while California-headquartered inDrive offers commission rates of 10-12% to its drivers in India, less than half the 25-30% given by Uber and Ola.