Rapido adds electric vehicles to fleet; logistics service scales up 3X during lockdown
Started as a two-wheeler bike-sharing service in December 2015, Rapido has expanded its services in logistics. When mobility had gone to a standstill during the first three months of lockdown last year due to COVID-19 pandemic, Rapido leveraged its logistics business
India’s largest bike taxi platform Rapido has on-boarded over 100 riders and electric two-wheeler as a part of its fleet to provide EV bike taxi ride service – Rapido EV. Partnered with Zypp Electric, Rapido aims to reduce its carbon footprint and encourage the use of environment-friendly vehicles.
Currently, the company has over 1,60,000 on-ground captains (riders) on monthly basis. Rapido is an aggregator and does not own any vehicles.
The new Rapido EV service will be a pilot run for three months starting from March 2021 and will be tested for its demand and veracity in the Delhi-NCR area. Rapido is looking to on-board more such EV partners to further expand this business model across its Tier I market in the country.
Started as a two-wheeler bike-sharing service in December 2015, Rapido has expanded its services in logistics.
When mobility had gone to a standstill during the first three months of lockdown last year due to COVID-19 pandemic, Rapido leveraged its logistics business. The company tied up with names such as Swiggy and Zomato for food and grocery delivery.
“There were a lot of Captains (drivers) who were dependent on us. So, we wanted to make sure that we provide them with livelihoods. That’s when we expanded our logistics offerings. Whenever our captains are free, they can also do food, grocery or package delivery,” Aravind Sanka, Co-Founder, Rapido.
The company also introduced the ‘Local’ service to deliver packages and goods for consumers who could not commute due to pandemic. “We used to do logistics even before Covid-19 but very minimally, but we have scaled three times during COVID.
Rapido Local was a service which has been launched during the lockdown. Logistics used to be only 8 per cent of all business pre-COVID days but right now over 20 per cent comes from logistics, which also includes Local,” adds Sanka.
In the last three to four months, Rapido has also expanded from a two-wheeler ride sharing to three-wheeler ride sharing too. In the last five years of our operations, Rapido has on-boarded around 1.5 million captains.
Source: businesstoday
