Start-up of the week: Saving the world via carpooling

Greenpool is an app that helps people carpool, with members of their own workspace fraternity or even residential locality, and works similar to ride sharing services offered by taxi aggregators. The app’s algorithm attempts to find matches within the same company that a user works for or with professionals working in the same IT Park. Ravikumar Kumarasamy, a former VP with Polaris who worked on Core Banking solutions globally is the Founder of Greenpool. When Ravikumar wanted to get back into the work life, after an ACL reconstruction surgery of his knee, he started looking for carpooling solutions, as his doctor had advised him against driving. And that’s how the idea was incepted. 

He says, “During my research, I found that carpooling as a concept had not really picked up in Chennai, or even India for that matter. There are four critical problems ailing the carpooling model. One of them is inflexible timing – IT employees do not have fixed timings due to which permanent carpooling becomes unviable. There is also the trust factor – I wouldn’t know the people I might be carpooling with. Ascertaining the cost of carpooling and splitting it among the riders is also an issue. Routing is another major factor that we learned to solve, thanks to our design philosophy.” He adds, 

“We conducted pilot projects in IBM, HCL and Wipro and we got some great feedback following which we modified our algorithms to make the app more efficient. The business model we are looking at is charging 15 per cent over the cost of the ride. On the new app, we have two slabs for intra-city commute – Rs 30 (for 20 km) and Rs 50 (over Rs 20 km). Lots of car owners are doing this as a service and it helps them network with people from their own fraternity. We have around 2,200 registered users with us now. Within the next three weeks, our plan is to bring on board 15,000 people in Chennai.” 

Ravikumar points out, “Peer to peer carpooling now involves private cars, which is about 85 per cent of the cars on the roads. Capacity-wise, we can put them to use in a better way as they are driven by individual office-goers. Once private cars get into the mix, which is dominated by taxis, think about the business potential it offers. Also, we have been told that ladies feel a lot more comfortable and secure travelling with professionals from their own fraternities rather than commuting in a taxi.”