Why an e-scooter rental like Bounce will completely (re)transform urban transportation
Anyone who has spent any length of time in the city of Bangalore will know the hopeless feeling of being stuck in traffic.
Bangalore is India’s third-largest city, often touted as the Silicon Valley of India. The city has seen explosive growth in population which has migrated from across the country due to the rapidly expanding tech and manufacturing economy.
The city wasn’t designed to keep up with this growth. With tiny roads, limited parking spaces, and few public transport options, Bangalore’s infrastructure is struggling to cope.
The silver lining — we’re getting some killer memes.
Enter Bounce
In recent years, scooter rental startups like Bounce, Vogo, and Yulu have been working to address this problem, gradually changing the face of urban transport in cities like Bangalore.
Of these, Bounce is the only one that offers dockless scooter rentals, which means you can pick up the scooter from anywhere and drop it off at your destination.
Let’s look at this business model in some more detail.
But first, who are they?
The journey towards Bounce began in 2014 after Anil Giri, one of the co-founders, tried to place an order for a Royal Enfield bike. He was told to come back after a year.
Realizing that it was much more practical for Indian consumers to rent high-end bikes rather than buy them, the three co-founders, Vivekananda Hallekere, Varun Agni, and Anil, decided to launch WickedRide — a Bangalore-based startup that allows people to rent luxury motorcycles.
But they knew that this model wasn’t scalable. Plus, they wanted to go after the bigger challenges.
“Mobility is broken,” says Vivekananda, in an interview with YourStory CEO Shradha Sharma. “Today, true fundamental mobility is only accessible to a privileged few and Bounce is trying to change that in a significant way”.
The trio wanted to find a solution that could address the challenge of mobility at scale, making it accessible to everyone rather than just a few.
In 2016, in collaboration with the Bangalore metro, they seized the opportunity to provide first and last-mile connectivity to the city’s residents. Metro Bikes was born, and Bangalore residents began to see their rental scooters about town.
Till today, a significant portion of Bounce rides (about 40 percent) begins and end at metro stations.
But to really scale, they needed to give people the ability to pick up and drop the bikes anywhere.
This was when co-founder Varun began exploring the tech for dockless IoT-enabled scooters. He developed the patented keyless tech that’s used in Bounce scooters today — with this, users can unlock the scooter using only an OTP.
And in September 2018, Bounce was born, with 200 keyless scooters in its fleet.
By July 2019, within 10 months of launching dockless scooters in Bangalore, Bounce had clocked over 5 million rides, covering 30 million kilometers.
By January 2020, it had 25,000 scooters in its fleet and was doing 120,000 rides a day — over a third of the share of rides in the Bangalore metro.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic effectively stopped the mobility business dead in its tracks, putting a great big dent in all of Bounce’s plans. After struggling to manage the impact of the pandemic for a few months, they downsized massively. They sold all their petrol scooters to reduce EMI costs — and the company went fully electric.
Today, according to Bounce’s website, the company has enabled about 30 million total rides covering 165 million kilometers. Apart from this, they’ve enabled a total of about 3 million rides on electric vehicles (EVs) covering a total of 16.5 million kilometers — and reduced carbon emissions amounting to 691 million tons.
Why Bounce will be the last scooter-share business standing
“If I was to talk about a vision, I believe we can do over one million rides in a day. If there is any category in mobility that can achieve that kind of scale in India, it is scooters,” said co-founder Vivekananda in an interview.
Although cab-hailing services like Uber and Ola have disrupted the Indian mobility market, there’s still a market that they aren’t able to address. For these consumers, cabs are too expensive, and public transportation options are too limited and time-consuming.
Scooters offer a fast, convenient and inexpensive way through the traffic jams of large metropolitan cities.
Competitors like Vogo (backed by Ola) and Yulu (partnered with Uber) employ a hub-to-hub model, which often means that their bikes are better maintained — it’s easier to hold users accountable for damage to the bikes and their accessories when there’s a human receiving the bike at a designated hub. But Bounce’s dockless scooters, despite being the worse for wear at times, offer a degree of convenience that remains unparalleled. Commuters seeking to travel to work, for instance, would prefer to be able to drop the bike near their workplace rather than at a designated Vogo or Yulu drop zone, which might force them to walk the last few kilometers.
The proof is in the fact that as early as 10 months after the launch of its dockless scooters, in July 2019, Bounce reached the milestone of 60,000 rides per day in Bangalore. This made it the fastest-growing bike-sharing startup in the entire world, beating even global players like Lime and Bird.
Although two-wheeler taxi services like Rapido, UberMOTO, and Olabike also cater to the same market, Bounce is more affordable than these options. Bike taxis also restrict riders to the option of traveling alone whereas with Bounce, riders can choose to travel with a pillion rider. Finally, especially in the post-pandemic world, bike rentals are usually perceived as safer than taxi services. Many women riders might prefer to travel alone if possible, while COVID fears also deter some riders from choosing an option that entails close contact with another person.
Because of all these reasons, Bounce is the strongest contender in its market, set to truly democratize mobility in India.
Who are Bounce’s users?
Apart from giving women a greater sense of safety (women passengers account for over 30 percent of rides on Bounce), Bounce bikes are used regularly by college students, professionals commuting to work, and homemakers.
According to the founders, Bounce scooters can have a huge societal impact as they enable people to get to their livelihood, education, and more, in an affordable way. Smaller cities and even residential areas in large cities may not have dense public transport coverage, making it difficult for students and professionals to commute to their workplaces or educational institutions. If buses are available, they can be extremely time-consuming, especially in peak city traffic, or restricted to particular hours.
City residents who don’t have access to a private vehicle might even have difficulty accessing basic services such as grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies, supermarkets, gyms and fitness centers, railway and metro stations, and so on.
With Bounce Share scooters, users can simply find a scooter when they need it and drop it off when they don’t. This can mean people get to their jobs and classes on time, and meet all of their daily needs, without spending hours commuting — and get more quality time at the end of the day to spend with their children and other family members. And they get this level of convenience without having to worry about any vehicle maintenance schedules or costs.
Especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities with limited infrastructure, this can also mean the difference between having and not having access to critical and life-saving services such as medical, dental, and veterinary care.
Bounce is also actively contributing to this positive societal impact in other ways, such as by training women free of cost to use electric two-wheelers. In August 2021, it announced plans to train at least 1 million women across India. This initiative would empower women to drive bike taxis part-time or seek out gig work. Hundreds of women are already being trained in Bangalore. Bounce will also help these women get their driving licenses and find suitable work.
And while this is good for society at large, it also helps with Bounce’s unit economics. Increasing ridership means that Bounce can get 60 to 100 km more out of each vehicle in a day. It’s a win-win — bringing women riders and college students on board for the promise of part-time earnings also helps Bounce achieve optimal utilization of its fleet in the long term.
Bounce Share: Pros and cons
With COVID, the business has taken a hit, but the company has strong plans to ‘bounce’ back
In 2021, Bounce announced that they were manufacturing and selling their own electric scooters. Deliveries are expected to start in April 2022.
Developed in India by Bounce, the Bounce Infinity scooter doesn’t need charging. Instead, it relies on a battery that can be swapped out with a fully charged one at a Bounce charging station. Every swap takes only 1–2 minutes.
Swap stations are automated units that can hold up to six batteries and keep them charged. These can be standalone stations or attached to a store, and open 24x7.
Bounce’s app tracks the charge in your existing battery and will alert you when it is time to swap the battery. You can then head over to the nearest swap station, connect to it using your app, and get access to the charged battery.
While the scooter plus battery is available for prices close to INR 69,000, to make the scooter accessible to more people, Bounce also offers the option to buy the scooter without the battery (which brings down the cost to ~INR 45,000). Instead, owners can rent the battery from Bounce after paying a monthly rental fee (INR 850 to 1,250) as well as a small fee (INR 25–30) per swap. This brings the running cost of the Infinity to about 40 percent less than that of a petrol scooter.
On the other hand, competitors like Ola Electric — which also started delivering its S1 scooter recently in December 2021 — are priced significantly higher. The S1 for example costs close to INR 1 lakh, while the S1 Pro costs close to INR 1,29,000.
Bounce Infinity: Pros and cons
In countries like India, EV adoption has been slow because of the high cost of electric vehicles, limited charging infrastructure, and range anxiety. But Bounce has solved all of these problems with a couple of key strategic moves:
- With Bounce Share, instead of owning EVs, you rent them as needed, freeing people from the responsibility of charging the vehicle when not in use, increasing convenience, and lowering the barrier to entry.
- With Bounce Infinity, instead of charging the vehicles, you charge batteries alone and switch them out as needed, eliminating the daunting prospect of searching for charging points or waiting in line for your turn.
By really knowing and understanding its user base, Bounce has been able to make strategic adjustments that have resulted in making electric scooters accessible to a vast number of people across the country.
Bounce’s journey towards becoming a major EV player
The next steps for Bounce involve building a dense battery-swapping network to support over 1 million scooters.
The goal? To put a swapping station within one square kilometer of every consumer. At this rate, a city the size of Bangalore would require about 500 swapping stations.
To do this, they’re partnering with mom and pop stores, and petrol pumps and also inviting members of the public to become operators. Apart from this, they also plan to offer on-demand delivery of batteries.
In the first phase of expansion, Bounce plans to deploy at least 300 battery swapping stations in every major city. In December 2021, it announced that it had partnered with NoBroker.com to extend its battery-swapping infrastructure. This partnership would give Bounce access to over 1 lakh NoBroker locations across India. Prior to this, the company has already set its plans in motion with several other partners such as Park+, ReadyAssist, Kitchens@, HelloWorld, and Goodbox to set up over 4,400 swapping stations across India.
Bounce is also making its network interoperable with other players. It recently announced a partnership with Jaipur-based EV maker BattRE for the use of its battery-swapping network. This comes close on the heels of Greaves Retail becoming the first OEM to join Bounce’s network earlier this year.
With its vision to fix the problem of mobility at large, Bounce is taking on a large market of previously underserved customers. And while there are many fish in this particular sea, Bounce’s unique and carefully thought out strategy sets it on a very secure footing.
