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When KNM Rao was waiting at the reception area of Huawei’s office in Bengaluru for a cab to get back home during his stint with the company, he noticed the snarling traffic. While a number of people were travelling through the same route or had the same destination, they were always hesitant to share or offer rides. That is when KNM realised that carpooling was the answer to put an end to traffic woes. KNM along with his friend Naveen Mamgain started researching the carpooling business. Although companies existed in the sector, there were definitive gaps in terms of lack of customisation, payment solutions etc that led to hesitancy amongst the target users.

Quick Ride was conceptualised in 2015 to address these gaps and create user-friendly software to make life easier for the urban commuter. “While most of us are aware of carpooling, we hardly use it for the lack of coordination or fear of travelling with strangers. With Quick Ride, we aim to help every car owner to build a carpooling culture and enable the urban commuters to start sharing the empty seats in their car or bike with other commuters,” says KNM.

The Quick Ride team is currently supported by three other founders – Shobhana Sriram, Naveen Mamgain, and Vishal Lavti.

“We want to empower the concept of urban shared mobility aimed at decongesting and reducing pollution in today’s developing cities,” adds KNM.

Building a sustainable solution

Quick Ride is now catering to 4 million people through its mobile application and website. “Traffic congestion is a huge challenge in the country and with Quick Ride, we have built an automated solution to ease end-end commute needs,” shares Naveen, Co-Founder and Head of Design.

He adds, “We differentiate ourselves from the competition in terms of the customisation that we offer to our users. Our users can easily change ride details such as venue and time on a day-to-day basis. Also, we have set some ground rules on how to behave in a carpool so commuters can enjoy a hassle-free ride.”

The startup has also taken the initiative to drive environmental awareness. Carpooling is a proven method to reduce carbon emissions to a considerable extent.

Quick Ride is now clocking a year-on-year so far, we have reduced 90K tons of carbon footprints, 150 percent with a presence in nine cities. Naveen says, “Our corporate partners include some of the top IT companies such as TCS, Wipro, Cognizant, Infosys, and Capgemini. We organise awareness campaigns at tech parks encouraging more people to take up carpooling for various benefits that it has to offer.”

Routing the domestic traffic

Quick Ride has recently ventured into taxi services with a .in domain. “For the last five years in the business, we have observed that a .in domain works best when it comes to reaching out to local audiences. It gives us an edge for search engine optimization purposes. Besides, we are proud of our Indian identity, and prefer to be known as a top-notch carpooling brand based out of India,” says Naveen.

“As people are increasingly using Google Search to pool cars or find taxis, our website plays an extremely important role for our business. So,  we have enabled the ‘Book Taxi’ option from the website itself. If you visit our website, you can easily book a ride without logging into the application,” he explains.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is the biggest internet exchange helping businesses across sectors to get their website registered with a .in or .bharat domain. Businesses can register a domain name of their choice and enjoy a cost advantage over a .com domain. For those looking to start the online business journey, a .in domain can be easily availed in 22 languages with the help of NIXI.

Sharing his vision for Quick Ride, KNM says, “To make commuting easy for everyone in the country, we are on a mission to remove 1 million cars from roads every day. That will be our contribution to building convenient commuting and reducing the carbon footprint. And, we are constantly innovating with new technologies to create a seamless carpooling experience for our customers.”

The ‘Shaping India Inc’s Online Growth’ series chronicles the journeys of startups and SMEs in India and how creating an online presence on the .in or .Bharat domain powered their success stories.