)
Bangalore-based online taxi aggregator TaxiForSure.com is eyeing a second round of institutional funding to fund its overseas expansion plans. It plans to raise around $10 million by January.
While the company has an aggressive expansion plan within India, it is also keen to launch operations in West Asia and the UK.
TaxiForSure.com had raised $4 million earlier this year from its seed investors — Accel Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Blume Ventures.
TaxiForSure.com, which currently has operations in Bangalore and Delhi, will launch operations in Chennai this month, followed by Hyderabad in December. The company also plans to expand in various other Indian cities including Mumbai and Pune.
“We are looking to raise funds because with our own profits we can expand to maybe just 10 cities by 2015. But if we take some funding, we may be able to expand to 25 cities in the same time period,” Raghunandan G, co-founder, told Business Standard. “Secondly, we are also looking at going international, for which we will need more money,” he added.
TaxiForSure.com was launched in June 2011 by Raghunandan and Aprameya Radhakrishna, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad as well as the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal. The company has a team of 274 employees. The firm has also hired some senior talent from the industry to widen its management bandwidth.
Online cab hiring in India is considered a sunrise industry, which is steadily gaining momentum. The opportunity that this segment offers is fast catching the attention of investors. In July this year, Mumbai-based ANI Technologies, which runs online cab rentals service Olacabs, had raised $3 million (Rs 19 crore) from its existing investor Tiger Global, in series B round.
