JOHNS CREEK, Ga., Dec. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ebix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EBIX), a leading international supplier of On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance, financial, healthcare and e-learning industries, today announced that one of its India-based EbixCash subsidiaries has acquired a 70 percent stake in AHA Taxis, a platform for on-demand inter-city cabs in India. AHA focuses its attention on Corporate and Consumer inter-city travel primarily, with a network of more than 15,000 registered AHA Taxis.
AHA has pioneered an offering of one-way fare for hiring taxis for outstation trips, whereas the trade norm used to be to charge the return fare. AHA solved this problem while engaging its proprietary technology, algorithm and network.
Founded by first generation entrepreneurs Amit Grover, Kunal Krishna and Shivam Mishra, who bring a solid blend of experience and youth to EbixCash, with hands on execution expertise in technology, operations and marketing; the Company today has a network spread across 4,000+ cities, having served 20,000+ routes and 15+ million kilometers of travel as of now.
Build on cutting edge technology that is served over the cloud to all its constituents, the AHA Taxis service is available at finger tips to consumers and corporates across the country. With features like number masking, live tracking, open APIs, multiple payment gateways, the AHA Taxis solution is available over any mobile device in an App form or over the internet in a matter of minutes wherever you are in India.
The AHA Taxis service is considered one of the most efficient and cost effective one-way inter-city travel options in India today, as the Company at any time has a massive registered network of cars who have just finished a one-way travel to a city from their home base location and are looking for passengers, to return back to their home city wanting to avoid going back without a passenger; and are thus willing to price the trip aggressively.
With partners like PayTM, Makemytrip, Yatra, Via, RailYatri, Zomato, Mobikwik, Savaari and Ticketgoose.com, AHA Taxis has built an impressive customer retention rate of approximately 30% and one of the lowest customer acquisition costs in the industry at 5% of its revenues. The AHA Taxis App is available on Android Google play and Apple devices both, besides being accessible on the web at www.ahataxis.com
With an inter-city market opportunity that is presently estimated at $10 Billion, and growing at 20% annually, AHA Taxis has focused its attention on this focused inter-city market segment. With a population of 1.3 billion people, an estimated 90% of the cab trips are booked one-way with two-way trips accounting for only 10% of the cab trips. AHA has focused its attention on this section through a blend of partnerships with OTAs, online and offline travel agents, Corporates, and the B2C Direct channel.
Ebix Chairman, President and CEO Robin Raina said “AHA Taxis provides our Via and Mercury travel brands with another in-house tool to cross-sell cab services to our Corporates, B2C clients and OTA clients. We were already using AHA as one of the outside vendors to whom we would handover inter-city cab travel, because of the efficiency and pricing provided by AHA. Our 260,000+ strong franchise network will now be able to not only sell cab travel as an integral tool through online cloud based technology, but also be able to register new car drivers to the AHA network across the country and convert AHA into one of the largest inter-city cab networks in the country.”
AHA Co-Founder Amit Grover said, 'We have been a startup till now that has grown approximately 100 times since January 2015. We grew AHA on minimal seed capital and became break-even in 2018. We needed the physical and digital client & franchisee expanse of a massive network like EbixCash to substantially grow our business. We are quite excited by the growth opportunities ahead of us.”
AHA Co-Founder Kunal Krishna said, “Our domain knowledge and technology has helped us solve the several decades problem plaguing the taxi travel space in the country. With Ebix, we intend to take AHA offerings to every Tier 2, Tier 3 city in the country and help millions of people save money on their travel. AHA technology does not only solve the problem for India, and in-fact can also be extended to other South Asian countries.”
AHA Co-Founder Shivam Mishra said, AHA has been positively changing the dynamics of outstation taxi market in India. We are set out with a mission of ‘Anywhere to anywhere one-way out-station taxi’, and we are ecstatic that Ebix would be helping us achieve our mission, and change the way people travel in the country.”
Prosight Partners advised AHA Taxis on this transaction. Ebix did not use any Investment Bankers.
About Ebix and EbixCash
With 50+ offices across 5 continents, Ebix, Inc., (NASDAQ: EBIX) endeavors to provide On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance, financial, healthcare and e-learning industries. In the Insurance sector, the Company’s main focus is to develop and deploy a wide variety of insurance and reinsurance exchanges on an on-demand basis, while also, providing Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") enterprise solutions in the area of CRM, front-end & back-end systems, outsourced administrative and risk compliance, across the world.
