The Estonian taxi dispatcher management programme Taxify – on which inventures.eu has already reported once – secured 100.000 dollars (approximately 70.000 euros) worth of investment from several business angels. With the funding, the team wants to support its sales efforts and target new markets in Europe and the United States.
The almost one-and-a-half-year-old enterprise received fresh capital through Märt Kelder, Martin Villig and Andrus Purde, Toomas Bergmann (co-founder of fleet tracking platform Navirec) and Finnish entrepreneur Mikko Silventola, founder Markus Villig told inventures.eu. “We talked to about ten potential investors,” he said, “and all were interested, so we got to choose the ones with the best know-how and match for us.”
The funds will mainly be put into strengthening the sales team and will also be used for financing marketing efforts in other European countries and the United States, where the Estonian startup wants to expand to in the near future, according to Villig. Before the recent angel investment, the venture was financed by about 10.000 euros from the founder’s family and a small grant from Enterprise Estonia.
Not at the end of the road yet
Taxify does not only rely on a B2C approach with its app where users can check the position of the nearest taxi but also a B2B strategy: they provide a backend system for taxi companies with a driver dispatch management, a fleet management system and analytical tools, with the whole software being browser-based.
Currently, the app has been downloaded about 40.000 times and, according Taxify’s CEO, some 10.000 active users and 1.000 signed up drivers are part of it. Drivers can also use the smartphone app to connect with potential customers. The respective taxi company pays a monthly fee for each driver they have registered and Taxify gets a small commission for every booking through the app, which is basically the core of the business model.
At the moment, Taxify’s revenues reach about 10.000 euros per month but since the company is expanding, it has still a long way to the profit zone: “We are rapidly hiring, so we are not profitable at the moment,” Villig said.
The next goal for Taxify is to launch the service in five Eastern European and American cities, but there is more on the finance side: “Then, we want to raise another 1.5 million euros round to push marketing,” Villig announced their plans for the future and added that “we want to grow by at least 300 percent this year”.
Eva Thalhammer contributed to this article
