Rapido’s next leg of growth lies beyond metros: Co-founder Aravind Sanka
The mobility platform is now present in every district headquarters across India, betting on affordability, employment, and demand from Tier II and III cities to power its next wave of growth. Co-founder Aravind Sanka spoke about the company's expansion at TechSparks 2025.
Bengaluru-based bike and auto mobility platform Rapido is going full throttle beyond metros, expanding across India’s Tier II and III cities in. Co-founder Aravind Sanka calls this the company’s next big wave of growth.
“We’re now present in every district headquarters, from Jhansi to Siliguri and across smaller towns,” said Sanka, during a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder & CEO of YourStory, at TechSparks 2025.
Rapido was launched in November 2015 by IIT graduates Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, and Rishikesh SR.
Over time, Sanka realised that while most big brands limited themselves to the top 10 cities, awareness and access beyond these places are almost non-existent. “We wanted to change that.”
According to him, the company’s expansion into smaller cities is driven by employment opportunities and affordability.
“Unemployment rate is so high that supply (of drivers) is easy to get,” he added. “And then there’s demand as well.”
Rapido, he explained, is not building for India’s top few million consumers but for the next 500 million. “We are not solving for the top 5 million or 10 million people. So that is the next wave we are going after.”
Today, Rapido serves over 5 million customers every day, powered by a network of 3 million 'captains’, as the company calls its driver partners.
With an average ticket size of Rs 100, the platform facilitates around Rs 50 crore worth of rides daily, though, as Sanka clarified, this figure reflects total customer spending on the platform, not company revenue.
Similar traction across cities
Interestingly, Rapido’s user penetration remains consistent across cities irrespective of their size.
“There’s a city with a population of 10 million (100 lakh), another with 1 million (10 lakh), and one with just 3 lakh. In all these three cities, our penetration is the same,” Sanka noted.
“That means the number of people who are paying in one of the metropolitan cities as a percentage of the population is similar across cities.”
Sanka attributed this to Rapido’s inclusive approach of “solving for everyone.”
Edited by Swetha Kannan