The world has become more fast-paced than ever with digitization and urbanization. Millennials prefer to have a care-free life rather than bind themselves with ownership of things. Drivezy, one of India’s biggest marketplace for two-wheelers and cars takes this attitude into consideration for its rental services.
Started in 2015 with the name JustRide, Drivezy allows its userbase to rent bikes, scooters and cars. The company works on a peer-to-peer model where car owners can list their vehicles on the platform with Drivezy taking a 20-25% commission from the renting.
The idea came after Ashwarya Singh, one of the 5 co-founders lost his new car in an accident. He spent good part of his salary in maintaining the car even though he did not use it for long and this gave him the idea of having a platform for car renting. He discussed this idea with his friends from college- Abhishek Mahajan, Amit Sahu, Hemant Kumar Sah and Vasant Verma. The other motivation was the fact that a lot of households in India could not afford cars.
Like any other startup, Drivezy also faced a few challenges in beginning like gaining trust of car owners and difficulty in leasing and buying cars because of financial constraints. It overcame all the challenges and has raised about $149 million in 10 funding rounds. The company competes with other ridesharing and taxi aggregators in market like Uber, Ola and ZoomCar among other.
Drivezy claims to have over $1.5 million registered users with a whopping 93% coming from age group 18-35. The company has processed about 4 lakh bookings and has a workforce of 500 spread across 11 cities. They are currently operating in 21 cities with about 2 lakh average customers monthly. The startup has plans to explore international waters starting with US where they plan to start a fleet of 200 cars in San Francisco.