200 Million commuters — Let’s Go / Vamonos / Chalo
#IndiaKaTimeHai #WaterBridgeVentures #Mobility #Portfolio
Humans have solved travel for inter-city and inter-country but the quality of commute in 80% of the cities around the world is below average. It has to change. When we improve our cities, our lives will be healthier and happier! The opportunity to build a company that can so dramatically impact the lives of millions comes once in several lifetimes
Chalo is solving a real-world problem that affects 200 million Indians every day and on the way, creating India’s largest Mobility company (Mohit Dubey, Co-founder & CEO)
Mohit’s 1st entrepreneurial venture’s (CarWale) success story is well known. He has had a small town upbringing, humble education and unconventional professional career until he decided to build the best new car buying, classifieds platform in India. Mohit exemplifies a true blooded, full-cycle entrepreneur as he built the business brick-by-brick (or should I dealer by dealer) making it a prized asset (over a decade), and then sold to CarTrade. While the experience polished him as a leader and a business builder, no stakeholder is complaining about the $115 Million price tag CarWale fetched. Anyhow that long story is for another day. Let me talk about his 2nd venture, and dare I say much bigger and better than the 1st one, which he had founded and had achieved early product-market fit before I met him. Chalo, a Hindi word, when translated in English means, Let’s go — makes all the sense given they are solving for mobility for millions.
A saying from an investment sage goes-“Good entrepreneurs blow you out of the water in the 1st meeting and great stories grow on you over several meetings”.
In 2017, my courtesy one hour first meeting with Mohit turned into several hours and discussions continued the following week with longer interactions. It is hard to not get rubbed by Mohit’s contagious energy and passion. He is one of those, ‘let’s leave the world in a better place than how I found it’ kinda guys. He is an inspirational leader with an eye for the trees as well as the forest. Most importantly he attracts really smart people to buy into his vision and to give their 100% for a mission, which explains his amazing co-founding and leadership team both at CarWale and now at Chalo.
For my VC lens, it helped that Chalo was solving a largely unaddressed problem of intra-city bus transportation. 200 Million Indians use these buses everyday, mostly for the home-work, home-school or home-market commutes. It is no surprise that Transport is the #2 spending category (after Food) capturing 20% of Indian household expenses. Bus tickets and transportation is a large market opportunity with $60 Billion expenditure every year. That’s a lot of money for a country with GDP/capita of under $2000. While #Ola and #Uber get talked about a lot given the western world (implanted) model in India which no doubt has grown well, bus tickets value is 8x-10x of taxi spends in India.
Despite large scale usage, the problem of Indian intra-city bus transportation lies in inefficiency of bus operations. Buses almost never show up on time, are overloaded at times or under-utilised at other times of the day. Estimates point out that the average Indian bus commuter spends equivalent of 8 days (per year) waiting on bus stops. Poor to no fleet management and lack of buses running on a schedule compounds the problem.
So how does Chalo solve this?
We love buses and believe that they run better on technology than fuel (Vinayak Bhavnani, Co-founder & CTO)
Chalo has developed an end-to-end proprietary technology solution based on hardware on the bus (IoT devices and ETIM ticketing machines) and software on the cloud such that commuters see live buses on a mobile app, while Chalo can do bus scheduling, fleet management and ticketing as part of bus operations. Commuters get a free service which they cherish.
Time is money, and Chalo saves lots of it — #ChaloApp
Chalo works in partnership with bus operators and over time leverages the power of the data generated on the platform to help operators with route optimisation, crew management and revenue maximisation.
Our operations are extremely intensive, often localised and very hands on — buses run 24/7 and that means so do we; we process 100 million unique data points daily; we count among our staff, experienced software developers, operations and supply chain experts, transit specialists,GPS technicians and bus conductors. (Nikhil Aggarwal, Co-founder & COO)
In just under 5 years, Chalo is present in 25 cities, has 23,000 city buses, processes GMV of $250 Million and 70 lakh tickets per day.
Chalo is #Blitzscaling by starting with a basic service i.e. improving the experience of using city buses with 30 minutes less waiting per commuter, up-to 50% lower ticket transaction cost, which kick starts a virtuous circle where happier commuters means more rides which in turn means more revenue for bus operators, which means better services for commuters.
Chalo is a rare case of large unaddressed problem being solved by the best possible team with unabridged passion, hunger and application (Investor sentiment)
It helps to know that the benefits of providing a great mobility solution goes beyond time and money (of millions of commuters). A bus can take up-to 30 cars off the road, reduce tonnes of emissions, improve safety, increase household savings and lead to a significant improvement in quality of life. Global mobility leaders like #Uber aren’t blind to the idea as seen from the #UberBus launches around the world’s congested cities.
So where do we from here. Sky is the limit in this case really.
My crystal ball gazing shows Chalo in 100 cities across 10 countries operating 100,000 buses in 5 years with several hundred million dollars of Net revenue.
Chalo is undoubtedly the next and biggest Mobility #Unicorn coming out of India and I look forward to healthier and happier commuters around the world. Amen!
