Mumbai based startup ToGo is social carpooling mobile app

March 5, 2017March 27, 2018 Geekopedia 0 Comment Apps, Carpooling, Dehi, IIT, Indian Startups, Kanpur, MBA, Mobile, Mumbai, Social, startup, ToGo, Zupp

ToGo (short of ‘Together we Go’) is the world’s 1st social carpooling mobile app which groups people traveling on same routes for the purpose of carpooling. People in a group can chat with each other or in the group to find suitable carpooling partners.They are trying to build trusted communities of people on all routes of the world, so that members can carpool to office daily, or to a tourist destination, or to airport, or to a nearby city, with like-minded people.

Their vision is to make carpooling an alternative means of transport. With rising issues such as pollution, lack of parking space, traffic congestion on roads, etc. the world needs a permanent and sustainable solution.

The Mumbai based startup is founded by Parth Patel, Chintan Pandya & Vipin Raghavan . Parth is Mechanical Engineer from IIT delhi and has overall 4 years of work experience with EY and e-Commerce Startup. Chintan is Electical Engineer from IIT kanpur and has overall 4 years of work experience with Qualcomm. Vipin is MBA graduate from Symbiosis Pune and has overall 7.5 years of work experience with EY and SKS Microfinance.

ToGo is solving the daily commute problem of home-office travel. Traffic congestion and pollution and two leading drivers of carpooling industry, and both of them are growing at an alarming rate! In future, we are going to more initiatives such as odd-even. In Jakarta, >10 people died in a 35 hour long traffic jam.Worldwide many startups have tried to solve the challenges of intra-city travel by organized carpooling. However none of them have succeeded. The reason: All of them have the same “send request-accept request” model wherein the lift taker has to individually send request to car owners. This is cumbersome and also makes the car owner feel like a driver – the social angle is lost.However the very interesting phenomenon that they noticed is that people are carpooling vigorously via WhatsApp groups! They form WhatsApp groups of office and residential complexes. These groups have the ingredients of trust, social connection and convenience inbuilt in them. They took a cue from this phenomenon and launched ToGo – a group chat based carpooling mobile app – A FIRST GLOBALLY! All users have to do is enter their daily route of office commute, and they will automatically join a chat group traveling on that route daily.

Their vision is to make carpooling an alternative means of transport. The scope is huge. In Mumbai alone more than 1 Cr people traveling every day between home and office and 8.6 lakh private cars. Even if 10% of these cars enroll with them, they will have 86k cars, compared to Ola+Uber’s 30k in the city and 35k Kali-Peelis.

Also since ToGo is asset-light with no logistics involved, it can be launched on the fly across the world, which is precisely what they are aiming in next 3-4 years.

They had launched Zupp before launching ToGo, which was again a carpooling mobile app. Zupp was like all other intra-city carpooling apps out there – with “send request – accept request” model. There weren’t many takers for Zupp. So they started from Square One again with their failed experience of Zupp and launched a group chat based carpooling mobile app, namely ToGo.

And here they are witnessing awesome traction in a short span of time.

~9,000 active users in 3 months
>200 handshakes per day
> 400+ users in Thane-Parel group and without any marketing, 300+ users in Mumbai-Pune group
– Best app search optimization in Play store. Search ‘carpooling’ on Play Store, ToGo will be on top.
– Proven repeat usage

Some of the features of ToGo are as listed below:

Security – Option to travel with same gender, or with members who have verified their official email IDs
Flexibility – Post as lift giver or lift taker at your own will
Convenience – Co-travelers may decide pick-up and drop points amongst themselves via call/chat
Interface Familiarity – WhatsApp group like user interface makes life easy
Hassle Free Transaction – Exchange the fare via PayTm or cash
All in one Car Pooling – Create both intra-city and inter-city route based groups

They have raised around 50 lakhs in seed round, and are looking to raise another round of pre-series A funding.

Download the ToGo App and the enjoy the ride sharing.