MakeMyTrip has spent two decades selling the trip. It now wants the commute, too.
The Gurugram-based travel group said on Friday that it acquired a majority stake in Quick Ride, a Bengaluru ride-pooling platform, for an undisclosed sum. It is the company’s first move into shared mobility and puts it in the segment where Indian commuters actually travel every day, rather than a few times a year.
A restructured target
The deal did not buy the whole company. Quick Ride’s brand and ride-pooling business were first moved into a new entity, Co Ride Mobility Private Limited, and MakeMyTrip took its majority there. Quick Ride’s founders continue to lead the business. The older electric taxi arm stays with the predecessor company, iDisha Info Labs, out of the transaction.
Quick Ride runs an asset-light model: it matches people travelling similar routes for car and bike pooling and has built partnerships with corporates, IT parks and business campuses to supply riders. Founder and chief executive KNM Rao said joining the group marked a milestone for a team that had spent years connecting commuters.
Why pooling fits the portfolio
Group chief executive Rajesh Magow framed ride pooling as a high-frequency complement to the existing ground transport stack, which includes redBus. The plan is to apply what the group learned scaling redBus in India and overseas. Prakash Sangam, who runs ground transport and redBus, described the same customer being served from the office commute to the weekend trip home.
The acquisition continues a run of tuck-ins: Savaari in car rentals, Happay in expense management, Flamingo Transworld in holidays and a minority stake in visa platform Atlys. The strategic logic is retention. Owning the daily ride keeps a user inside MakeMyTrip’s funnel between the bookings that used to define the relationship.
