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Launched in April 2015, the company went by the name Justride and served as an aggregator in the carsharing space. In July 2017, the company underwent a rebranding and shifted focus to the marketplace model. Drivezy started featuring motorcycles and scooters on its platform in the same month. As of July 2017, the company operated 1,600 cars and 800 two-wheelers on its platform with services in 6 cities across India including Mumbai, Bangalore Pune, Goa, Mysore and Mangalore. Drivezy was one of the 3 Indian companies selected by Y Combinator for the 2016 summer batch.
The company was founded in April 2015 by Ashwarya Pratap Singh, Hemant Sah, Vasant Verma and Amit Sahu, all alumni of Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad and Abhishek Mahajan of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. JustRide was conceptualized when Ashwarya and his friends lost their newly purchased Ford Figo in an unfortunate accident. Starting off as a luxury car rental service with 8 cars, JustRide adopted the aggregator model. The company dry leased cars from licensed operators. The cars were in turn micro-leased to people on an hourly basis.
In March 2016, the company launched a marketplace platform, allowing individual owners to list their cars. Drivezy also opened its platform to two-wheelers (motorcycles and scooters). In October 2017, Drivezy began accepting payments in Bitcoin, becoming the first vehicle sharing company in India to accept a cryptocurrency. The company has also announced the launch of its own cryptocurrency; Rentalcoins.
Drivezy commenced country wide services in August 2015 with simultaneous launches in Bangalore and Pune. Drivezy was selected by Google for the maiden batch of the Launchpad Accelerator program in January 2016. Under Google's mentorship, the company piloted a carsharing platform which enabled people to rent their cars when idle. Drivezy was selected by the American startup accelerator Y Combinator for the 2016 summer batch. Drivezy was one of the 44 startups that presented on the Day 1 of the YC Demo on 23 August 2016. Drivezy raised $10 million in a part-equity and part-debt round. The equity investment totaling $5 million was made by Axan Partners, Das Capital and IT Farm, while a group of banks and NBFCs including Mahindra Finance, ICICI Bank, Cholamandalam Finance and Shriram Finance has invested $5m in debt in Drivezy.
Drivezy is primarily a car sharing platform where customers can rent cars on an hourly or daily basis. The company aggregates cars from licensed operators which it classifies as vendors. In March 2016, the company announced the launch of a peer-to-peer car sharing platform which let individual owners rent their vehicles to urban commuters.
Drivezy introduced motorcycles and scooters on their platform in 2017. Working on C2C module akin to its car sharing platform, the company launched two-wheeler rental services in Bangalore with 250 motorcycles and scooters. In August 2017, Drivezy started renting two wheeler vehicles in Mysore.
Smart Vehicle Technology or SVT, in short, is an in-house product developed by Drivezy for the purpose of scaling the company's car sharing business. SVT makes use of a car's on-board diagnostics (OBD) and Global Positioning System to relay performance parameters such as tire pressure, fuel consumption, and vehicle location to a central server. The data is used to keep track of vehicles and schedule repairs accordingly.
Rentalcoins is a cryptocurrency launched by Drivezy that allows collaborative investments into a shared fleet of vehicles. By purchasing Rentalcoins, investors crowd fund vehicles that are listed on Drivezy. The company raised $5 million in the first ICO for RentalCoins.
In February 2018, Drivezy launched inter-city one-way car rentals, allowing customers to book a car from one city and drop it in another.