Catch Taxi Kenya is a new entrant into the African ride-hailing industry that prioritizes safety, comfort, and efficiency.
Catch Taxi Kenya, launching to take on Uber, Bolt, MaraMoja Transport, Safeways, Cabby, Ride, Jayride among others, such as SafeBoda, OPay, Max, Gokada, is operated and owned by Africans for Africans and brings local creativity and insights to get improving the experience of riders and drivers.
Nafie Omar, co-founder and CEO Catch Taxi, says the firm’s vision is to make an app that captures all local African needs into one super App from ride-hailing to complete ecosystem services.
“Nairobi is Africa’s technological hub. In terms of ride-hailing, Nairobi is a more mature market compared to most cities in Africa. Our goal at Catch Taxi is to be able to create a footing in all African markets-both young and mature markets,” said Omar. “We will also be expanding into Sudan next year and West Africa and other Southern African countries later.”
Catch Taxi knows there are several other platforms in the market but says its disruptive entry to market ensures strong earnings for its driver partners. It’s also introducing an affiliate programme to allow third party drivers, influencers and ordinary individuals to make passive income.
Its business model is simple. Catch Taxi will get you where you want to go at the best prices, safely and comfortably. It charges its drivers a 15% commission from every trip. The firm has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from several angel investors and is not afraid to take on giant Uber and Bolt which just raised €100m from London-based Naya Capital Management.
However, the ongoing pandemic has been a huge blow to how Catch Taxi would have wanted to grow. COVID-19 slowed down its efforts both in Addis Ababa this April and Nairobi. Just 2 weeks after its launch in Addis Ababa, it had to redirect its efforts to compensating its drivers by giving them incentives.
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Benard Gavana, Catch’s VP Growth and Expansion told TechMoran.com that the Kenyan startup decided to start operations from Ethiopia because of its huge population and attractive market but its whole executive team is Kenyan and is based at its HQ in Nairobi, Kenya.
The firm said it also provided free trips to essential workers and gave huge discounts to its riders. As the economies open up, Catch Taxi is focused on growing its market share in Africa through local recruitments, marketing, and fine-tuning its product.
The 38 person-team spread across operations, developers, customer service, marketing, and data analysis aims to be an everyday app that incorporates all consumer needs from ride-hailing, E-commerce, financial services, travel, hotel booking to delivery services in Africa.
After its Ethiopia and Kenya launch, Catch is looking to expand across East Africa and then into entire Sub-Saharan Africa banking on neural networks and ML algorithms to understand user patterns and be able to target them appropriately.
