“By the end of 2023, New Delhi will be totally in black and blue: black means we’ll be in profit and blue means that our cabs will be all over the city,” said Punit Goyal, co-founder of electric-cab-service company Blusmart Mobility Pvt. Ltd. This may be overly optimistic for a four-year-old company whose May 2022 valuation exercise predicted a cumulative loss of ~Rs 75 crore (~$9 million) over the next two years before it finally hit profitability in 2024-25.
Goyal’s confidence is rooted in a conviction that the Gurugram-based company—which operates a total of 3,200 cabs in select pockets of the national capital region (NCR) and the southern Indian city of Bengaluru—can do no wrong in the times to come.
He said the company would put 10,000 cars on the roads by March 2024 and service all parts of Delhi-NCR, where it started operations in 2019. It will also begin functioning in the country’s financial hub, Mumbai, this year before expanding into other metro cities like Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
The fortunes have shifted in favour of Blusmart over the past year due to customers’ rising dissatisfaction with cab aggregators Uber and Ola. Unhappy over high fares due to rising fuel costs, long wait times, and last-minute cancellations, consumers have been seeking alternatives to the duopoly in the ride-hailing market.
“It’s a tremendous hassle,” said Sayon Mondal, a Hyderabad-based engineer. “Once, I had to wait for 40 minutes and go through eight cancellations before a driver finally came to my doorstep. By then, the price had also nearly doubled,” he added.
During peak office hours, customers are often subjected to surge pricing and drivers’ profit-capitalising whims—one has to waste precious time looking for a cab and cough up 1.5-3X the normal price for the same ride.
“Ola and Uber have been playing with their prices. If you book a ride for Rs 350 (~$4), the cost can shoot up to Rs 430 (~$5) by the time it ends. I want to pay what was shown when I booked it,” said Vibhas Sen, a Delhi-based campaigner with a nongovernmental organisation.
This is where Blusmart—which has built its customer base on two pillars of no surge pricing and zero cancellation—has found the opportunity it had been waiting for all along. The electric-vehicle (EV) fleet operator that has raised $80 million in equity and debt so far and is in advanced talks talks YourStory Blusmart in advance talks to raise $250M; closes $100M in EV asset financing Read more to secure another $250 million in its Series B round also has separate sections for “city rides” and “airport rides”. Goyal confirmed the company would raise a large Series B round in 2023 but didn’t disclose the amount.
Blusmart distinguishes itself from Uber and Ola in more ways than one.
