Homegrown start-ups are catering to Bangladesh's on-demand taxi boom

Bangladesh is no exception to the fragmented nature of taxi industry across Asia, finds Tech in Asia

How have O2O taxi start-ups proven to be so wildly popular, to the point that they’re digging their heels in for a protracted battle against each other? The answer simply lies in the fragmented and chaotic nature of Asia’s existing taxi industry. Long viewed with suspicion and mistrust, aggregator start-ups harness the power of the internet to provide transparency and clarity for end-users. And they love it.

One such start-up trying to bring a localised version of the Uber model to Bangladesh is BDcabs.
 

BDcabs is a little different from other popular aggregator start-ups in the continent. Its core focus is on the technological aspects of operating on-demand taxi services. Factors, such as supply of cars, are handled mostly by its partnerships with existing rent-a-car companies and metered taxis. Aggregation of private cars is a distant third.
 

Founder Ishraq Tariq says that they started engineering an on-demand system in February 2012 and designed it such so that it could work with all big operators. Their core software, which is already in use by some companies in Bangladesh, is kind of a ‘dispatch system’, which connects users requesting rides to idle inventory in their fleet.
 

“In Bangladesh, we like to haggle a bit, negotiate. So when you select your ride, you’ll get offers from metered taxis as well as fixed operators. It’s not like Uber where you are instantly connected to the nearest available car. You get to choose from several options,” explains Ishraq.
 

As for fares, Ishraq elucidates that there are different models, dependent on the type of car which will fulfill the request.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.