Pathao has become one of the biggest ride-sharing service providers in recent years. It is one of the most popular ride-sharing platforms in countries where other ride-sharing platforms are unavailable. It has brought about a revolution in such nations and continues to bring more improvements to the platform.
Pathao is actually a Bangladeshi tech-start that was established back in the year 2015. It was initially founded to provide logistics services to e-commerce stores and related platforms. Their logistics service was able to gain huge popularity in a short period of time due to their exceptional services.
People were really impressed by the company’s promise of delivering products to the clients at a comparatively quick pace. Back then, its promise of ensuring delivery within 24 hours enabled it to partner with more than 3000 businesses around the country.
Back then, Hussain M. Elius, Pathao Founder and CEO, along with the co-founders Shifat Adnan, and Fahim Saleh started a Facebook group to provide delivery services to their friends in 2016. The founders wanted to do more with their motorbikes instead of just making deliveries. And that’s certainly how ‘The journey of Pathao – A ride-sharing platform’ began.
In addition, after introducing the user-friendly mobile application – Pathao App, its service started to draw massive attention.
As of now, Pathao offers mobility solutions by providing economical ride-sharing along with a wide range of vehicles across bikes and cars. Latching on to the growth in the e-commerce sector, Pathao has expanded its services from bike and car ride sharing to food delivery services, delivery logistics providers, and even parcel services. It ensures to provide quality service with regard to customers’ needs and demands without any issues.
The mantra behind Pathao’s success has been a business model that tapped into a market suffering from a supply-demand gap in its urban transportation system.
Because of the severe traffic congestions, life was often at standstill for a huge portion of the city dwellers; especially for those, who availed the public transportation. Pathao just understood the situation and offered the city dwellers a new form of relief from this issue, a ride-sharing platform available to anyone.
Along with these, a persistent focus on service quality enhancements, successful branding, the socio-economic contexts, and the relentless passion of the company’s management had been critical driving forces for the company’s success. Yet, the most valuable aspect of Pathao’s success story is the impact that it has brought upon the lives of the people suffering from busy schedules and traffic congestion.
Pathao uses peer-to-peer ridesharing technology. Peer-to-peer ridesharing which is also called dynamic ridesharing or on-demand ridesharing is a service that operates to arrange one-time shared rides on very short notice. To put it clearly, it is a digital interface that connects drivers and riders on-demand via platforms such as mobile applications and websites. In addition, they take advantage of the recent advanced technologies such as GPS navigation devices to run their operations.
Pathao app operates in a simple 5-step process. They are as mentioned below;
- First, the rider opens the app, sets the desired destination, and chooses the types of ride he/she is looking for.
- Then a nearby driver gets notified and he/she accepts the ride.
- On the next step they meet and start their journey, the platform suggests their routes for fastest and safest travel.
- After reaching the destination the rider pays in his/her preferable method.
- On the last step, the rider shares his/her opinions and suggestions about the ride on the platform.
The global ride-sharing market is expected to grow by more than 50 percent between 2020 and 2021. The market value of this sector is estimated to be around $117 Billion Dollars in 2021. As per reports, that’s a massive increase of nearly $50 Billion Dollars as compared to that of 2020 which was about $75.39 Billion Dollars. DiDi, Uber, and Lyft are among the key players in this industry.
According to a report by Forbes, Pathao has raised over $12.8 million from four rounds of funding and its estimated net worth is over $100 million. While the numbers are estimations only, there is certainly no doubt that the company has been able to generate huge revenue in recent years.
As per Pathao’s latest financial statement, it has been able to generate a huge turnover of over $14 Million. It is estimated that the number is going to increase in huge amount in the upcoming years.
With the aim of expanding their business beyond their borders, Pathao started providing its services in Kathmandu, Nepal back on September 25, 2018. Today, Pathao has become one of the biggest and most popular ride-hailing service providers in Kathmandu.
Initially, Pathao only focused on its bike ride-sharing service to develop an ecosystem among the local community. But as of now, Pathao has become a transportation technology providing a full range of app-based services including ride-sharing, food delivery, and free games.
Expanding into Nepal brought success for Pathao primarily due to Bangladesh being the number one motorbike exporter for Nepal. To create demand for the bike ride-sharing service, Pathao pushed clients from the ground level in Nepal, a similar strategy that was adopted earlier in Bangladesh.
Due to cultural similarities, the strategy worked just right. Go-Jek, the strategic alliance of Pathao had been extending its support to capture the South Asian market including Nepal.
In the context of Nepal, the ride-sharing platform has become an important aspect of a society that influences the new business practice. Over the last decade, it has been defined in various ways. Some describe it as a smart means of transportation that the travelers with similar destinations share the journey and split the travel expenses.
While others describe it as, “A way that the drivers can earn extra money while intermediaries can earn up to 20% of each transaction.” The second description reflects the current practice of ride-sharing platforms in Kathmandu. There are currently more than 75,000 registered Pathao riders in Nepal and more than 1 million customers.
While sharing rides, not only travel expenses and space are shared by the rider and the customer on the back of a motorcycle but it also gives them an opportunity for interactions. These interactions provide room for various social identities such as class and gender to be negotiated on the back of a motorcycle.
However, when the motive is to make a profit by sharing rides, it may not always be applicable. This is so because it is a platform that makes profits through facilitating sharing, not the sharing itself that makes the profit.
A company that was initiated with a team of only 30 people, now has over 600 employees, and over 50,000 bikes as a part of its ecosystem. In the early days, they had only about 100 riders as a part of their ecosystem and now, that number has increased to over 100,000.
As of now, its motorbike and car-hailing vertical alone serves five million riders across five cities in Bangladesh and Kathmandu in Nepal. Pathao’s ridesharing services help people beat traffic and reach their destination right on time at an affordable price.
If you want to become one of their riders and earn some extra money, then you are always welcome. The steps to becoming their Rider (Motorbikes) or Captain (Cars) are really simple and safe. You can learn more about it at: How do you become a Pathao Rider or Captain?
They also provide training to beginner riders and only trusted riders are accepted by them.
To sum up, Pathao has proven to be revolutionary when it comes to the ride-sharing and delivery sectors. It has succeeded to achieve its goals in a comparatively shorter period of time. Every day, more and more people are becoming a part of its journey and it continues to do so in the coming years as well.
Being one of the fastest-growing tech startups in Asia, it is working to provide optimal solutions for the daily transportation problems of the public. It was able to capitalize on the ride-sharing market and has been able to leave its competitors way behind the line. With the ever-increasing demand, it has been working on plans to meet the needs and demands of the customers.
To be honest, I took a lot of references from various sources in order to write this article. Without them, this article would just not be possible at all. So, a big thanks and shout out to the sources and references of this article.
If you want, you can check/read the references for a more in-depth study. Here are the links:
- PATHAO: A tech start-up that shook Bangladesh
- A Mobile Ethnographic Study of Pathao and Tootle in Kathmandu, Nepal
- Pathao Nepals’ Official Site
I hope that this article was helpful to you. I genuinely wish that you got what you were looking for and see you in the next article.
Best Regards!!
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