EditorThe ever expanding Unicorn club has a new member and this time it hails from Europe. In its latest Series D round, the France based long-distance ride sharing company BlaBlaCar has raised $200 million. With this the company has taken its funding to over $300 million till date. BlaBlaCar has also joined the ever-expanding list of billion dollar startups and stands out as one of the most well-funded young tech companies in Europe. Young, because the startup is just nine years old and already has a valuation of $1.6 billion. According to CEO Frédéric Mazzella, the trips on BlaBlaCar’s platform have an average of 220 miles in distance, and therefore the price per mile is about 20 to 30 times less than a regular Uber ride.
Many a times, BlaBlaCar is compared to Uber as both of them share the same ride-sharing and commission based model. He further said that it competes more directly with regional bus lines and trains rather than taxis or other intra-city car-sharing services such as Uber, Lyft and others. Apart from this the definitive difference between Uber and BlaBlaCar is that BlaBlaCar drivers don’t make a profit beyond sharing the costs, which has enabled the company to expand without running into regulatory issues in most of the markets.
Today, BlaBlaCar operates in 19 countries with more than 20 million users. Founded in 2006 by Mazzella, Nicolas Brusson (COO) and Francis Nappez (CTO), the startup’s growth has been phenomenal and there’s more to come. CEO Mazzella came up with the idea for the startup when he could not find a train to go back home from Paris to western France during Christmas. The founding members then built a platform that connects passengers with drivers and allows them to book seats in long-distance rides. Similarly to the AirBnb model, passengers and drivers on BlaBlaCar rate each other and write reviews. Citing the company’s survey, Brusson told ORBES that they create routes that don’t exists and create more demand. He gave an example that a ride between Paris and Brussells costs only about 20 euros via BlaBlaCar but the train ride would cost 80 euros.
BlaBlaCar is looking to expand to more countries and invest their latest funding in emerging markets like Russia, Turkey, India and Mexico. Although this funding has been raised with the help of US based firms like Insight Venture, BlaBlaCar has no intentions of expanding there as Brusson says that US has a higher disposable income per capita but low cost of driving when compared to other markets. This would mean that the carpooling service would a bit less attractive for them at the moment.
Zainab Asif
Damodar Kalyan
