Car and Bike sharing firm Drivezy bags $10 Mn, launches its ICO

Bengaluru-headquartered peer-to-peer car and bike sharing platform Drivezy has raised $10 million in a mixed round of equity and debt.

The equity investment totaling $5 million has been made by Amercian and Japanese investors, including Axan Partners, Das Capital, and IT-Farm, while a consortium of banks and NBFCs including Mahindra Finance, ICICI Bank, Cholamandalam Finance and Shriram Finance has invested $5 million in debt in Drivezy, reports ET.

Following the investment, the total capital raised by the company stands at $16.5 million, and the Y-Combinator-backed startup also announced the launch of its private Initial Coin Offering (ICO), focussed on the expansion of their P2P marketplace for cars and bikes.

The company had raised $3 million in November last year in a bridge round of funding.

Drivezy has partnered with Unocoin to enable bitcoin transactions, which will allow individuals to buy or invest in the cars and purchase cryptographic tokens entitling them to a share of the revenue generated by rental transactions on the platform.

For the ICO, Drivezy has partnered with Japanese payment firm Anypay, which will provide advisory support in terms of scheme structuring, token development and more to the Indian company.

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Founded in April 2015 by Ashwarya Singh, Hemant Sah, Vasant Verma, Abhishek Mahajan and Amit Sahu, all alumni of IIT-Bombay and NIT Allahabad, Drivezy underwent a rebranding exercise in July 2017 and rechristened it from JustRide.

The rebranding came as part of the company’s strategy to make a transition from an aggregator to a marketplace model, and become a peer-to-peer car sharing platform. This allows individual car owners to list their cars on the app when they are not in use, which is then micro-leased by Drivezy.

Drivezy has a fleet of over 1,300 vehicles listed across four cities. The fleet has about 1,000 cars with the remaining being bikes.

"We will be launching cycle rentals in Bengaluru next month. We are also looking to launch operations (for cars and bikes) in Kochi, Udaipur, Chennai and Hyderabad next," said Ashwarya Singh.

At a monthly growth rate of 25% and 20,000 bookings per month, Drivezy claims to clock Rs 1.3 crore in monthly revenues. The vehicle sharing platform is looking to scale its fleet by more than six times to 8,000 divided equally between cars and bikes.

Drivezy: Website