iCabbi CEO Gavan Walsh and his team on Sutton beach. Image: Crispin Rodwell
iCabbi provides commercial taxi fleets with cloud-based dispatch technology in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada and Finland.
Dublin-headquartered taxi app iCabbi has claimed to have surpassed the milestone of 500m bookings.
The company provides taxi fleets in Europe and North America with cloud-based dispatch technology along with customer and driver apps as well as intelligent voice assistants.
‘With our current growth, we aim to double our bookings and break 1bn bookings in the next two years’
– GAVAN WALSH
iCabbi was founded in 2009 by Gavan Walsh (CEO), Bob Nixon and Niall O’Callaghan, and is headquartered in their hometown of Sutton in Dublin.
More than a third (37pc) of the 500m trips have been made in the past year. The company, which has bases in Dublin, Sheffield and Montréal, currently handles 750,000 bookings a day and is used by 75,000 vehicles.
iCabbi says it now powers 40pc of the enterprise taxi market in the UK and lists eight of the top 16 companies as clients.
“We have disrupted what was a lacklustre industry in the UK,” said Walsh.
“We introduced a cloud-based system and brought a fairer solution into the market whereby you pay per vehicle, per month. 99pc of our customers are not on a contract, meaning that we earn our renewals every month.
“Taxi companies keep switching to us because they see the benefits our software offers and how we are planning for the future of the taxi industry.
“With our current growth, we aim to double our bookings and break 1bn bookings in the next two years.”
Making room to vroom
iCabbi’s software enables traditional taxi companies to compete with new entrants into the market such as Lyft and Uber. In Ireland alone, the company claims it powers 80pc of the taxi market.
iCabbi has entered into a strategic partnership with Groupe Renault, which took a 75pc stake in June 2018.
A subsequent recruitment drive has seen 60 new hires since November, bringing the total headcount to 135, 70 of which are involved in product R&D.
“The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi global alliance is the world’s leading electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing group and very much sees taxis as playing a key part in the future of mobility as a service,” said Walsh. “Linking with a company like iCabbi allows Renault a fantastic opportunity to align the development of EVs with large fleets in major cities, creating green transport hubs.”
“In the last 12 months we have gathered a team of highly talented individuals to ramp up our next phase of innovation, which aims to put taxi companies at the centre of mobility. We have opened a new development hub in Montréal, expanded our Dublin HQ by another floor and are about to launch the iCabbi Marketplace, which provides a space for open source innovation for the industry.”
