blog Recently I’ve been trialling the various new taxi booking apps which have become active around Sydney. I catch taxis a lot, as I’m a journalist and often need to get to weird places in a hurry for press conferences, briefings and so on. In my opinion, goCatch is easily the best app, due to its combination of functionality (the app itself is great) and its popularity with drivers. Uber has a good app also, but I’ve had a lot of problems with driver availability. And the last one I’ve tried has been ingogo, which probably has the best driver availability, but an app that is quite buggy. It’s this last app which is the focus this morning, however, as, according to the Financial Review, it’s picked up another $3.4 million in funding. The newspaper reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):
“Investment bank UBS and private equity funds have poured $3.4 million into ingogo, which offers a mobile-phone taxi-booking app, valuing the two-year-old Australian start-up at $25 million as it prepares to list on the Australian Securities Exchange next year.”
What this investment, as well as the planned ASX listing and its past healthy fundraising efforts, shows is that ingogo is pulling in substantial revenues. And anecdotally I’ve found this to be the case as well. Most of the taxi drivers I’ve spoken to about the new apps have a favourite one, and for most of them it’s ingogo. I don’t personally like the app’s UI, but it seems to be working well for taxi drivers and passengers alike. It will be interesting to see whether the app gets long-term traction. Personally I don’t see why the taxi companies couldn’t just implement this technology into their existing systems … but then, taxi companies haven’t precisely been open to change in the past. It’s great to see that someone is making up for their failings.