With Asia being home to 60 percent of earth’s population, mobility will always be a challenge. With growing economies and increasing purchasing power, the cities have become over-crowded and overwhelmed with the mobility demands. Millions of people demand better mobility mechanism to reach their places of work everyday and its natural that public transport network is not able to cope up. This is where shared mobility companies come into picture and leverage cutting-edge technology to solve this critical problem plaguing major economies.
Here is our pick of top 5 shared mobility companies in Asia to watch out for 2021.
Ola Cabs
This India-based ride-hailing platform integrates city transportation for customers and driver-partners in the country. Consumers can book a range of cabs, bikes, auto-rickshaws, and shuttle buses with Ola’s mobile application. Users can book city taxis, car rental, and outstation travel, corporate travel services through its app which is available on iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. Founded in 2010, the company has its headquarters in Bangalore and has users across 100 cities, and employs 1.5 million+ driver-partners. The company is funded by range of investors including Accel, Tencent Holdings, Tiger Global Management, and Sequoia Capital.
Grab
One of South East Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform Grab has 2.4 million drivers. Besides ride-hailing, Grab also offers ridesharing and logistics services in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia. The company was founded in 2012 and is part of the Unicorn club and is headquartered in Singapore. Grab also offers food delivery service GrabFood and a mobile payment service GrabPay. Grab is backed by a range of investors including Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital, and Vertex Ventures. The company secured $200 million from Stic Investments, a Seoul-bases private equity firm in August 2020.
GoJek
Indonesia-based, GoJek is one of the leading ride-hailing platforms in South East Asia and competes with Singapore’s Grab. The company also offers Go-Pay, an e-money service that has widened its reach to restaurants in Indonesia. GoJek was founded in 2009 by Kevin Aluwi, Michaelangelo Moran, and Nadiem Makarim. The company aims to create a positive socio-economic impact on its customers, business, driver-partners, and MSMEs. The company is backed by investors including PayPal, Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, Facebook, and Google. In March 2020, GoJek raised $1.2 billion for expanding further.
Drivemate
One of the leading peer-to-peer car-sharing platforms in Thailand, Drivemate was founded in 2016. Vehicle owners can put their car on rent on Drivemate. The company provides trust to both parties with full insurance coverage and customer service. Drivemate is backed by investors including NeSol Technologies, USA, 500 Tuk Tuks, USA, and Total Access Communication, Thailand. The company managed to raise US$2.2 million in a Seed round funding round led by NeSol Technologies in 2017. The company has a large network that offers more than 9000 cars and tuk tuks and is available in 35 cities across Thailand.
DiDi
DiDi is a Chinese shared mobility company headquartered in Beijing with over 550 million users and millions of drivers. The company provides app-based transportation services, including taxi hailing, private car hailing, social ride-sharing and bike sharing; on-demand delivery services; and automobile services, including sales, leasing, financing, maintenance, fleet operation, electric vehicle charging and co-development of vehicles with automakers. Didi has raised a total of $21.2B in funding over 22 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jul 24, 2019 from a Corporate Round round.Didi is funded by 37 investors. Toyota Motor Corporation and Christian Cadeo are the most recent investors.
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