INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Like it or loathe it, Uber changed the face of modern urban transportation by providing a relatively pain-free way to order a car to take
its approach is not the only way ahead
Blacklane, a transportation-on-demand startup from Berlin, provides a template for another kind of strategy, one based on minimal outside
month.Some have described Blacklane as something similar to what Uber was like when it first started out, and on the surface, there is some
But unlike Uber, which from its earliest days always traded on the idea of providing five-star service at an affordable price, Blacklane
aims at the higher end of the market, targeting corporate workers, executives and those who have the means to pay extra for higher levels of
asked me the question of how we would react to the big ride-hailing players
Blacklane, with around $77 million in funding, is much closer to the average player in the world of transportation-on-demand.Collectively,
nearly $81 billion has been raised by 428 ride-sharing startups, according to data from Crunchbase
raising around $25 billion and $21 billion), with the list rounded out by the likes of Grab, Lyft, Ola, Chinese trucking company Manbang,
and bike companies like Ofo, HelloBike and Meituan.If you take the rest of the funding and distribute it equally among the rest of the
significantly more, if not $25 billion more).The most recent financials for the company cover 2017, when it reported revenues of 44 million
euros and a net loss of 10.5 million euros
makes Blacklane a relatively rare thing in the ride-sharing world: a quiet but healthily growing startup.The message here is that for the
rest of the field, and for any other founders looking at building a transportation or on-demand-distribution-of-anything startup, there is
