Justifying this move, Jugnoo explains that its strategy to diversify its offerings and enter into another new vertical comes at an apt time, when drivers are seeking an alternative to resolve their earnings and incentive issues.
“We at Jugnoo saw a vaccum in the taxi aggregation business. We analysed the issues faced by taxi drivers off late and have come up with a strategy to provide taxi services at prices where drivers do not work at artificially lower rates than their costs. It’s a capitalist world where we have to manage expectations of both the customers and drivers together. At the moment, the existing players have not been able to balance this and therefore, we intend to fill in the gaps,” said Chinmay Agarwal, Co-founder and COO, Jugnoo.
Launched in November 2014, Jugnoo started as an auto rickshaw aggregator, and has now expanded its services across 40 cities in India. It has recently taken to other hyper local segments like food and grocery delivery with services like Fresh, Meals, Grocery and Jugnoo Delivery.
According to the company officials, most of the Jugnoo cabs will have All India Tourist permit, which means they will be able to ply from Gurgaon to Delhi. However, as the booking services are not made available in Delhi yet, one may not be able to pick a cab from Delhi.
SoCoMo Technologies, which runs Jugnoo, had raised $10 million in a Series B round of investment led One97 Communications in April last year. So far, the startup has raised $16 million which includes $5 million in Series A funding from Snow Leopard Technology Ventures in May 2015, and $1 million from Rakesh Mathur, Co-founder of Junglee (which was acquired and re-launched by Amazon), Vikas Taneja, MD, BCG Group, Kirloskar Brothers and others in a seed round in early 2015.
