[The F Word] WickedRide raises $9.1 M funding led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners

Online bike rental platform WickedRide has raised funding of $9.1 million led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. According to the RoC (Registrar of Companies) filing submitted by the company, Raghunandan G, co-founder of TaxiforSure, which was later acquired by Ola, participated in this round of funding.

The platform was started in 2014 by Vivekananda Hallekere, Varun Agni, and Arun G. Initially focussed on luxury bike rentals, WickedRide is now also into scooter rentals.

In an earlier conversation with YourStory, Vivekananda had said

“All three of us were crazy about bikes, like most men are. We always dreamt of riding bikes like Harley Davidson, Triumph and BMWs, and used to drool over these bikes every time we glimpsed one of them.”

The idea for Wicked Ride came from their shared dream of working on innovative ideas. They had already been working on developing business software and mobile applications. But, the craze for bikes superseded all that.

Their first bike was the Continental GT café racer. It graced Wicked Ride on April 3, 2014. Since then, it has added the Harley Davidson Iron 883, Super Low 883, Street 750; Royal Enfield Classic Chrome, Desert Storm, Thunderbird; and Triumph Bonneville to the collection.

On WickedRide, a user can rent the bikes from weekly to yearly basis, depending on the needs of the customer. Apart from Bengaluru, the team is also present in Mysuru, Manipal, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur to name a few.

Two years back WickedRide also launched the scooter and two-wheeler rental arm - Metro bikes. The team had even tied up with the San-Francisco based ride sharing platform - Uber. Metro Bikes lends bikes and scooters on rent to urban city consumers. There also is a monthly-subscription plan, that the consumer can use to pick a bike from a metro station and drop it there.

Tazzobikes raised an investment of $225,000 and a bridge round from DSG Consumer Partners in October 2016. Prior to that Tazzo also raised an undisclosed amount of angel investment from Kapil Chopra, President of the Oberoi Group. It plans to expand the fleet size to 2,500 vehicles and 100,000 monthly rides by 2018. With India being the world’s biggest market for two-wheelers, many big and small bike rentals players are already in the space, which includes RentOnGo, Wheelstreet, Rapido, and several others.