Chauffeur-Privé, a French rival to the car-hailing app Uber has been rebranded Kapten. This move is meant to make it sound less French so that it can expand to other markets in the next couple of years.
Founded in 2011 by Omar Benmoussa, Othmane Bouhlal and Yannick Hascoet in Paris, Kapten is one of the leading ride-sharing players in the country with 2 million users. It was launched in Lisbon recently and has managed to gain 80,000 users in the city. It is all set to launch its service in Geneva next week and London in a few weeks. The French startup aims to operate in 15 cities by 2020.
Acquisition by Daimler
Back in December 2017, a majority stake of Chauffeur-Privé aka Kapten was acquired by Daimler AG, a German carmaker. Later, BMW Group merged their mobility service businesses into Intelligent Apps. With the rebranding to Kapten, Intelligent Apps will become Jurbey. Its free-floating services, charging services, parking services and itinerary apps will be merged to make it simple.
However, the ride-sharing services of Intelligent Apps – Clever Taxi, Beat, mytaxi and Chauffeur-Privé will not be merged for now. There could be some consolidation in the coming years.
Kapten gets new features
Kapten will spend millions of euros on the aggressive advertising campaign as it has been rebranded. Also, there are some new tweaks that have been made. Now, the minimum price has dropped from €6 to €8 making it similar to Uber. The company will compensate for the change in pricing by paying drivers an equivalent of €8 per ride. Notably, the company takes 20% cut on every ride and aims to generate more revenue with €6 per ride.
Drivers will also get new features that will be effective from today. The free waiting time has been reduced by 5 minutes to 3 minutes so that drivers do not waste much time in waiting for passengers. It also brings a new feature to go back home and accept rides on the way.
It makes itself different from Uber by saying that they will keep pay taxes in the local markets where they provide their ride-sharing service.
Achievements so far
Kapten has shared that they have managed to gain 2 million clients and 200 companies contributing to 20 million rides on the whole. In 2018, the startup handled 7.5 million rides with €17 to €18 per ride. It has 250 employees for now and hires 100 more employees this year.
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