Self-drive car rental marketplace JustRide has raised USD 3 million in bridge funding from Susa Ventures, Kima Ventures, Axan Ventures, SCM Holdings, ITFarm and Y Combinator partners Justin Kan, Qasar Younis and Paul Buchheit. With this fresh injection of funds, the company is looking to scale up the fleet size and develop new technologies for smart vehicles.

The startup was a part of Y Combinator’s summer batch and has previously received funds from the accelerator. After switching from an aggregator model to a marketplace model earlier this year, JustRide is looking to scale up the fleet from 300 to 2000 adding close to 300 vehicles per month. Along with this, they will put more funds towards JustConnect, their car sharing platform. The funds would also go towards further pushing Yabber, an IoT device to track driving analytics to be used for car sharing.

According to the news report by ET, JustRide has an annual GMV of USD 3.5 million and USD 1.5 million in net revenues currently. Abhishek Mahajan, CFO of JustRide claims that according to their projections, the company will be profitable when they have 500 vehicles in the fleet and will clock an annualised GMV of USD 5 million. The company is also looking at a higher round of USD 7 million from the current investors to further invest in the in-house Smart Vehicle Technology.

Source: ET

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The self-drive car rental market is picking up momentum as people are getting used to the idea. Over the last few years, we have seen multiple rental services enter the Indian market and try to position themselves in different ways. In India, the rental services are largely used by travellers for weekend getaways or at their destinations for exploring local attractions.

With car ownership getting costlier and our roads getting packed with vehicles, we will see the self-drive rental services accelerate their growth in the coming years. Now the car rental company, JustRide has offered a new service called Ubiq. Under Ubiq, they are offering weekly rental plans for urban commuters. Prices start at INR 4,000 per week (5 days) which includes fuel for 500 kms of driving.

According to the company, they are trying to give carpooling at corporate level a boost and discourage people from buying cars. A large fraction of the cars sit around unused for most part of their life and this is a move to reduce that. On the other hand, the demand for self-drive rental cars is lower on weekdays as compared to weekends and the lower prices on Ubiq would ensure the available cars are utilised to their maximum.

We saw Zoomcar introduce something similar in September last year with multiple plans to cater to office goers. JustRide offers better prices per kilometre to the travellers while Zoomcar has a stronger presence across regions. The idea is attractive and prices are very well justified but when it comes to office commute, these services not only compete against each other but also against the cab hailing services like Uber and Ola.

Apart from Ubiq, JustRide also offers an interesting service that allows drivers who can’t afford a car to rent cars and use them as cabs with Ola or Uber. JustRide was founded by IIT Mumbai and NIT Allahabad alumni and raised USD 2 million in pre-series A funding last year. You can find more details about JustRide and the Ubiq service on JustRide.in.

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