Gett, the ride-hail startup that has nicheeted itself in a crowded and competitive on-demand transportation market by focusing on corporate accounts and connecting people with rides in around 1,500 cities serving a range of fleets from Use third-party providers. adds another partner today as the business model continues to double as business travel slowly recovers.
Gett has signed a contract to integrate Curb Mobility to integrate yellow taxis into Gett’s app, which will now cover around 65 cities in the United States. The news comes at a time when Gett is looking to expand its service to meet more demand: it notes that rides are currently around 80% of what they were in Q1 2020, just before Covid- 19 really delves into the western world.
As far as we know, the deal does not involve any investment between Gett – which has raised around $ 865 million to date (including the most recent completion of a $ 115 million round) and was most recently valued at $ 1.5 billion in 2019 had – and Curb – that’s part of it from Verifone after the payments hardware company acquired it in 2015.
(If you think it sounds strange for a payment hardware company to have a taxi fleet app, this is just part of Curb’s business, and indeed a hardware player as well: in addition to Curb, it offers a way to welcome yellow taxis – the app covers around 50,000 taxis and 100,000 drivers – the company also builds hardware for taxis and fleet operations, including metering apps, payment terminals and interactive screens for passengers to pay for rides, see messages and advertisements and much more.)
To differentiate its service from the very financially strong Ubers and Lyfts in the world, Gett has developed a two-pronged strategy that covers both scaling and services for its users.
In the area of scaling, Gett has turned away from managing contractor fleets in the US for a number of years: in 2019, Gett effectively closed after years of beating Lyft and Uber in its primary New York subway market its main fleet operating in the region and instead signed a contract with Lyft. This has become something of a template that the company has replicated in other cities outside of the United States where it doesn’t have a significant market share. (For example, Ola is another gett partner.) In some cities where it has a larger footprint, like London and Moscow, Gett works directly with drivers.
Partner fleets made up a third of Gett’s business in the first quarter of this year. However, with Gett bringing more to its network, the company expects partner fleets to cover the majority of its trips by the end of this year, the company said.
In the service sector, Gett has made a big bet on building a platform that is integrated in companies in the back end to simplify the ordering of trips and simplify the compatibility with a software for the cost management and accounting of companies. Gett’s big advantage to potential customers is that this software makes hiring a taxi with Gett cheaper and much more efficient compared to the alternatives – for starters, users can compare different prices from different providers – and gives users a vastly wider range of choices.
“Today’s partnership solidifies Gett’s position as a technology platform focused on ground transportation management (GTM), which is spending $ 79.6 billion worldwide,” said Dave Waiser, CEO and co-founder of Gett, in a statement. “In the past few years we have become the market leader in the GTM category, serving over a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies.”
On the Curb side, it is providing drivers who use their software one more link to an app that can bring more business to you, and not just cover other on-demand auto apps, at a time when drivers have more choices than ever before , but is also environmentally friendly, training-ready and traffic-intensive options such as e-bikes, scooters and shared trips. As the profile of the average business user changes and gets younger, it also changes the expectations many of them have of preferred ground transportation options depending on their situation.
“As US cities prepare for the return of international travel, our partnership with Gett will create new income opportunities for local drivers and ensure that Gett’s business users have access to the same safe and reliable transportation that locals trust,” said Amos Tamam. CEO at Curb. “By integrating with platforms like Gett, we aim to make taxis more ubiquitous online by giving today’s consumers and businesses new digital ways to find and book taxis.”