EV Cab Startup Evera Raises Rs 60 Crore
On potential competition from BluSmart and industry giants Uber and Ola, Trivedi said the market is large enough for more players.
Electric cab provider Evera has raised $7 million (around Rs 60 crore) in its first funding round.
The New Delhi-based company secured the investments during a pre-Series A funding round in two tranches—initially led by IEG Investment Banking Group, Germany; followed by Direct Capital, a subsidiary of Devonshire Capital, Thailand; and Westova Global, Singapore.
Evera is aiming to make a dent in a market where cab hailing giant Uber and BP Ventures-backed BluSmart have made progress.
The company currently operates only in Terminal 3 of the New Delhi Airport. "Our current fleet is about 238 cabs. Last year, we had signed a deal with Tata Motors Ltd. for an additional 2,000 cabs. We've received the first tranche of about 70 cars. The order should be done by the end of the current year and we'll have a fleet of about 2,200 cabs," Nimish Trivedi, founder of Evera, told BQ Prime.
The funds will be deployed to further the company's tech stack and expand services at the Delhi airport and across the city, Trivedi said. "We need to add a lot of technological advancements, in terms of integrating the backend of our B2B customers."
Evera also ties up with corporates, such as Orix and EY, to provide EV cab services, he said.
"Our app is integrated in such a way that drivers can cater to several clients through one single platform. We need to work on that further. On the B2C side, we have already integrated with MakeMyTrip."
On potential competition from BluSmart and industry giants Uber and Ola, Trivedi said the market opportunity is large enough for more players to join in.
"Delhi-NCR, at one point in time, was a market of about 2 lakh cabs. This got depleted during Covid and no new cabs were being added. So, the market size now is big enough. Even if we have 20,000 more cabs, there will still be no competition. There's space for 2-3 more players," he said.
As compared to Evera, its rival BluSmart has a total fleet of 2,700 cars, most of them Xpres-T EVs from Tata Motors, as of November last year. It aims to expand to more than six cities with a fleet of 25,000 cars by the end of 2024.
Uber, in February, signed a pact with Tata to buy 25,000 electric vehicles and deploy them across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad. In January, Indian ridehailing giant and now EV maker Ola had said it will launch a fleet of 10,000 electric cabs, without any details on the timeline.