Customer, vendor demand help OlaCabs record 40% monthly growth

New Delhi: India’s first car rental and point-to-point cab services aggregator, OlaCabs, said it has recorded an average growth of 40 percent each month this financial year, taking over 10,000 customer calls daily. The company also expects to hit the $100 million revenue mark by April next year.

Attributing its growth to the increase in the number of operators that have joined its service and to continuing customer patronage, Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO, Olacabs, said, “The growing number of bookings is an indication of tremendous customer confidence in our service and also the need for a reliable and on-time cab service that can happen at scale only with technology, the kind of which we use. What is also heartening to see is the growing confidence of cab operators in the Ola brand.”

Olacabs has onboard over 1500 operators - which includes single-owner driven cars as well as large operators - even as the number of cabs on the Ola platform has crossed 4000 across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. The cab aggregator offers bookings of its cabs online, through a call center and a mobile application. What’s more is that, customers can track the location of their cab from their point of pick up in real time - through their mobile application and for those customers who don’t have smartphones, through a missed call.

The company said that the number of bookings of its cabs, through its mobile app has increased by 100 percent quarter-on-quarter, since it launched last August. While the app saw more than 2 million visits across Android and iOS platforms since its launch, its web-booking platform had over 5 million visitors in the last year.

The company recently added new features to its smartphone app: a custom pick up - where a custom location pick up request can be made, a loyalty and referral programme - where one can invite friends to try the app and get rewards based on how many people referred have downloaded the app and also a wallet feature called OlaMoney - where the customer can add a charge to their OlaCabs wallet, which will get deducted when they use the service. Any remaining balance can be carried forward to be used on another trip.

Besides bookings through its own platforms, OlaCabs also partners with major online travel agents (OTAs) like Goibibo, MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip and Via to provide airport transfers as well as local/outstation rentals to their customers.

The company refused to divulge its revenue so far but said it is optimistic about touching the $100 million mark by April 2014.

“A lot of the new cabs added are a result of word of mouth from our existing operators. With the current scale of growth and the new cities we intend to serve in the year ahead, we are targeting a run-rate of $100 million by the end of FY14,” Aggarwal said.

Earlier this month, Olacabs launched its fourth city operation in Pune.