GHV admits online taxi booking start-up Mytaxiindia in its accelerator program

Gurgaon-based GHV (Green House Ventures), a progressive Business Accelerator for entrepreneurs and a catalyzing resource for innovators and new ventures, has picked up online taxi booking platform Mytaxiindia (MTI) for its acceleration program.

Launched in 2012 by Anshuman Mihir, the company offers a complete spectrum of chauffeur-driven services for personal and business requirements across 102 cities in India at unbeatable rates. The customers can choose between cabs, tempo travelers, and buses as the mode of travel for local or outstation travel.

Launched with an objective to empower start-ups to grow into billion dollar businesses, with healthy business metrics, GHV aims to speed up the growth of MTI and prepare it for the next round of funding. MTI will receive a seed funding of $100,000 through GHV. The accelerator program will not only provide the necessary resources and mentorship to MTI in a controlled environment, but also enable and empower them to scale faster.

“We are thrilled at being picked up by GHV for their acceleration program. We were struggling to raise our institutional funding for a while, as we were missing key business metrics. But now, we will leverage GHV’s Accelerator Program & the funds will be used to expand to other cities, scale up our operations, and launching a native mobile app – expecting to become operable in 125 cities with 1,00,000 active app users by March 2016,” said Anshuman Mihir, Founder and CEO, MTI.

Launched 3 years ago, MTI offers cabs for both intra and inter-city travel across 102 cities in India. The site allows the customers to check the availability of taxis in real time on any given date and make customized itinerary-based bookings.

The site offers a seamless user experience, allowing users to choose and book from multiple options of cabs available in their location in just a few clicks. And not just cabs, the company also facilitates bookings for tempo travelers, thus providing a wide bouquet of road transportation under one umbrella.

“We’ve got a lot of traction on our site without much advertising spend so far, and with GHV coming on board, we aim to get a considerable share of the Indian car rental market that is pegged at  $9 billion, of which only 4-6 per cent is organized,” Mihir said further.

Apart from facilitating end customers in booking cabs, MTI is also a B2B (Business-to-Business) cab rental portal, as it allows travel agents to book cabs for their customers based on their itinerary. Currently, 600 travel agents are registered with the company to save themselves from the hassle of calling multiple taxi operators. MTI’s clients also include corporates. The company runs daily discount offers for its customers and has a 24X7 customer support center.

“The reach of the company and its customer portfolio is something that excited us. The taxi market in India is growing rapidly and is still un-organized as these services are mostly limited to metro cities, offering a much wider scope for taxi booking companies to cater to customers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities,” said Vikram Upadhyaya, Chief Mentor, GHV.

He added further, “Also, inter-city business is tough to crack; despite being bootstrapped MTI is profitable. That says volumes about not only their idea and model, but also the team. They are well poised for accelerated growth.”

GHV has strategic tie-ups with World Innovation Labs (WiL), a Japanese VC fund, and NASSCOM’s prestigious 10,000 Startups Initiative, and a mentors’ panel – including Rajan Anandan, Sharad Sharma and RehanYar Khan. These help start-ups reach the Series A milestone fast, with minimum hurdles in the way.

Recently, GHV announced Lazylad a tech-start-up focusing on neighborhood commerce. Post the Acceleration announcement, Lazylad got shortlisted as one of the top 30 start-ups by Nasscom under their 10,000 Startups Initiative, and got selected for Innotrek 2015 program, where Indian start-ups were showcased to Silicon Valley VCs.