1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Give us a few examples of what you have invested in catering to that next 400 milion users.

Rahul Chowdhri: We invested in a company called VOGO. It is a scooter-sharing business like Lime or Bird. The problem that Lime solves in the US is very different from what VOGO is in India. VOGO is solving the problem of last-mile commute for people who take public transportation like bus, or tuktuk in India.

These are people who can’t afford a taxi ride every day while going and coming from home to their office. The next best available option is a bus, which is not comfortable and takes a lot of time. So VOGO is providing a proper scooter for people to travel three to seven kilometers from any point.

An Uber might charge you INR 17 per km, a Tuktuk may charge you INR 12 per km while in VOGO, you can go from point A to point B in a city at INR 4 per km. It breaks even if the scooter does four to five rides a day. Now there are countries where bike taxis work like Indonesia and Thailand use bike taxi.

Well, you can argue why don’t you do a similar model and why do you need to do a self-driving scooter model. A scooter might cost you an EMI of $70-$80 a month. If you put a driver on top of it, the price point jumps to five times. So, then you have to recover $350 a month versus $70 a month. You can’t afford to charge INR 4 or 5 per km if you have to recover the driver cost.

So, it’s an interesting model targeting a very different segment of users. These are the next 300 million to 400 million users that are coming on.

Sramana Mitra: In this example that you just gave us, this obviously requires consumer behavior change. What indications do you have that people are willing to make that kind of consumer behavior change? How are you dealing with all that?

Rahul Chowdhri: Cities are becoming larger and denser. Traffic is going up in India in a lot of larger cities. If you ever come to India, you will see a number of metro lines being laid out in all large cities in India. So people are moving towards public transport but the metro density is not the same as in New York.

If you get down at a metro station to go to your office, it is a 30 km ride. It still needs some sort of transportation. That’s where VOGO is a stepping stone. Consumer behavior is already geared towards adopting VOGO.

Over time, we expect that in any city you should be able to ride a VOGO within 100 to 200 meters of wherever you are. India has a lot of retailers. Now, VOGO already has more than 100 retailers in Bangalore who are willing to let scooters park in front of their shops.

They will do the refueling and will also take care of the scooters. They make sure nobody steals it and things like that. Having said that, the company also has a very interesting IT solution on top of its scooters. Each scooter is fitted with an IoT box which takes care of theft of the scooters and the fuel. It also gives them the ability to lock the scooter remotely and have a GPS. They have a gyrometer that can help in picking up the scooter. Those are the tech solutions the company has put in to adapt it to Indian conditions.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners
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