Mind Your Fleet creates an alternative universe to Ola and Uber
Traditional car rental companies have been struggling to maintain their position in the market due to the growth of aggregator companies like Ola and Uber. Cab aggregators need to start being solution-centric rather than fleet-centric. With the implementation of the surge charge, we can see the transportation industry getting fragmented.
Grabbing the perfect opportunity in hand, Mind Your Fleet, a Noida-based startup, stepped in. It provides a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) based service enabling the customer to access a wide variety of car and bike rental companies through a single platform. Creating an ecosystem for all, it aims to compete with Ola and Uber in terms of the quantity of vehicles offered. An alternative market to the leading cab players, Mind Your Fleet has enabled the vendors to fetch 10 x in just 24 months, creating a growth of 400 percent.
Entering their second year, they have recently raised their angel round of funding.
The journey of the fleet
In October 2014, 53-year-old Malvinder Singh Rikhy and 35-year-old Jitender Arora co-founded Mind Your Fleet. Hailing from Delhi, both of them share some common interests in the travel, hospitality and transportation industry.
While heading MGHworld, a hotel management software, Jiten met Malvinder, the then CEO of Kuoni Travels, with the intention of selling his product. The outcome of the meeting lead them to declutter the opaqueness surrounding the cab industry in India. They began providing opportunities to local car rental companies who wished to grow but could not survive the pressure of dealing with the bigger players. The company was founded with a mission to reorganise and optimise the ground transportation industry into a single sector, helping the customer reach out to a myriad of cab aggregators through their platform.
With the coming of Uber and Ola in India, traditional car rental companies are struggling to run their businesses. At any given time, a car rental company utilises only 30 percent of their accumulated fleet thereby wasting money on unused inventory. This is where Mind Your Fleet comes in. We want to bring the industry together with our unique inventory, fuel and vendor management tools
believes Malvinder, a graduate of St. Stephen’s college in Delhi.
Studying the model
With a native app for customers, drivers, corporate bookers and suppliers, the company provides solution to small and medium fleet owners to help them indirectly compete with cab aggregators like Uber and Ola. The vendors are provided with an option to share their inventory with one another, with low pricing, creating a strong partnership among the natives.
They also provide services where a car rental company owner can manage her/his operations with the help of one single enterprise tool. The end-to-end enterprise tool works for both B2B and B2C car rental Industries. They also extended their services to two-wheeler rental services, starting with Gurugram-based M-Taxi.
The company primarily offers fleet management, inventory management, supplier management, customer (B2B and B2C) management, billing and accounting management and employee management. The company charges up to Rs 25 per transaction, earning five percent of the cab aggregator’s pay.
Being a SaaS-based product company, the company runs on a triple-digit, month-on-month growth rate. Mind Your Fleet’s technology helps them to utilise and cross-utilise (with vendors) their inventories, which in turn helps them to gain significant economies of scale. Aiming to automate the car rental business, they have unified the system for all market competitors.
At the heart of it, the idea is to connect customers and vendors on a real-time basis, at a global level. The Mind Your Fleet marketplace can be seen as a gateway for full-utilisation and cross-utilisation (in other words, 'sharing') of inventories, managing suppliers, and enabling a transparent process of payment, without any errors. The Mind Your Fleet marketplace promises to increase a car rental owner’s business by at least 50 to 70 percent
chips in Jitender.
What the future beholds
In the coming months, Mind Your Fleet plans to launch self-drive, long-term rentals (LTR) module and employee transportation system modules. In addition, a complete revamp of the UI for apps will be completed, which will be compatible with the new changes in Android Marshmallow, and iOS.
With over three lakh bookings in just two years, they are a paid subscription-based model. The vendors get access to other vendors, buyers and customers through a single domain.
Global expansions are also on the cards, starting with Dubai, and expanding to Kenya, and other Middle-Eastern and African countries.
An overview of the industry
It is evident that the industry is revelling in opaqueness. The cab market is estimated to be growing at 17-20 percent in a year and is valued at a whopping $6-9 billion. If the market continues to grow at this rate, then it would be valued at $25 billion by 2025. Since an aggregator model needs low capital expenditure, this is the most-sought-after option for budding start-ups.
Having said this, this sector is fragmented and unorganised like none other. There’s an appalling amount of disconnect between the demand generated from both B2B (corporates) and B2C (retail) customers, and the supply provided. In a situation like this, without technology, a car-rental company can only optimise about 30 percent of its inventory, at most.
With the coming of Uber, Ola, and other such taxi aggregators, the transportation industry faced (and continue to face) disruption. These aggregators changed the business both dramatically and dynamically. Uber and Ola have been able to capture only about 10 percent of the Taxi Market in India, while the remaining 90 percent is still dominated by the traditional car rentals.
The cab aggregator space, unlike foodtech, healthtech and edtech, has not invited a fleet of startups, thereby making the industry less competitive. This nature of the market has allowed the new entrants like Zoomcar, Revv, Just Ride, MiCar, Carzonrent, Selfdrive.in, Voler, RentoMojo, and many other players are exploring the opportunity in self-drive car rental market. According to an estimate, more than 10 organised players are working in the segment in the four metro cities, with new players continuously joining in.