Remember Taxify? A little less than two months ago they launched their community based taxi summoning app in Latvia, the first focus country in an all-Baltic Taxify expansion package that had already taken promising first steps in its Estonian homeground.
Today Taxify is back in the news, announcing a recently closed $100,000 seed round, backed by multitude of angel investors from the US, Asia and countrymen from Estonia. A few of the mentioned investors include Märt Kelder, Martin Villig and Andrus Purde from “Skype Mafia”, Toomas Bergmann (co-founder of fleet tracking platform Navirec) and Finnish serial entrepreneur Mikko Silventola.
Taxify originally launched less than a year ago but they’re showing growth margin that could make any angel both confident and proud; three weeks after launch they had 5600 users, five month later the active users went in the 30k’s and by now Taxify is an app handling over 50,000 taxi bookings on a monthly basis. In other words, we’re talking about a monthly growth rate of 55%.
Last time Taxify’s grand goal resided in the lands of the United States of America, a target dream of a great many commencing businesses. Now it seems the focus is shifting towards the East as the latest seed round will be used to build Taxify’s base in eight new countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Taxify’s founder Markus Villig has a clear idea why said expansion is not only possible but actual: “Even though new taxi apps are growing fast, in majority of cities over 90% of rides are still handled by old-school taxi companies”, he says
“Using their existing fleet, and not going after independent drivers, allows Taxify to grow and bring new technologies to the transport sector faster than competitors.”
In terms of competitive advantage, Taxify is specifically focusing on SMEs and says its system allows them to automate their workflows and start getting orders via the Taxify app at a fraction of the cost of custom solutions (competing systems can cost thousands of dollars per car, according to Taxify). With a monthly fee of 12-15€ per driver/month, Taxify aims to become the standard for taxi companies looking for alternatives to outdated systems.
Taxify’s other focus is its rapidly growing Local Partner programme, which allows hungry entrepreneurs to set up their local Taxify business using a franchise model and become a city manager on a revenue share model. Taxify Local Partners program is currently invitation based, but you can request a demo here.
