BlaBlaCar looking to expand business in India; plans to set up first office in NCR

Paris [France], April 12 : French carpooling firm BlaBlaCar is planning to expand its footprint in India. In an interview with ANI after meeting with Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on the sidelines of India-France Business Summit here, Nicolas Brusson, co-founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar said it was planning to set up its first office in Delhi or Gurugram.
Talking to ANI exclusively on Wednesday, the co-founder said, "My discussion with Minister Goyal was actually what BlaBlaCar can do and how it can grow in India and he gave me some good ideas around. BlaBlaCar allows the drivers to share a car when they're driving between cities. It's carpooling and Intercity carpooling."
He added, "You drive from New Delhi to Pune and you have two or three empty seats in your car. You can go under our app and set up your profile. We verify your profile and then you can start like offering empty seats when you travel between the two cities and passengers can move with seats and share the cost of the journey."
The company, which launched its services in India in January 2015, currently doesn't have an office in the country.
"Today to give you a sense of size, we have four million active users in 2022 in India, and it's roughly doubling year on year. So it's really sort of like exploding right now," he said.
The co-founder of the French Unicorn company said that the future is to work in other cities in India, he said, adding "We plan to invest more in India". Brusson said that the company's main motive is to find the right hubs.
"We realise that there are some regions like Mumbai to Pune, New Delhi to Chandigarh, so you have this sort of corridors or region where carpooling actually makes a lot of sense, because public transport is not that good or it's too crowded or too expensive," the co-founder said.
He said the company needs to identify all the different regions where it can scale No. 1 and No. 2. "It's all about building more and more trust features onto the product, and more reliability features so that people feel it's as good... it's safe and easy to book proceed in someone else's car to travel in the country," he added.
Brusson said that the company is not competing with Uber or Ola, as these firms tend to be very different because it's all about like aggregating professional drivers, shorter distances within a city right and the price point is pretty high.
"Whereas in our case, people are just like normal people and they ride once a month or week. So it's a non-professional service versus a professional service," Brusson said, adding, "And, because it's cost sharing, it's 10 times less expensive on a per kilometre basis... So today, we don't compete we just create like another activity around affordable travel and sustainable mobility."