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New kids on the block: inDrive, Maxim challenge Indonesia’s ride-hailing giants
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Drivers of ride-hailing service Gojek and Grab wait for passengers in Jakarta on June 24, 2020. (AFP/Adek Berry)
G
ojek and Grab have dominated Indonesia’s ride-hailing sector for years, but two new players with Russian roots – inDrive and Maxim – have arrived to contest the giants’ supremacy.
Founded in 2013 in the cold city of Yakutsk, Russia, the online taxi service inDrive (formerly inDriver) was founded by a group of students who made a social media group called “independent drivers”.
The idea was to enable students to interact with each other to find and negotiate prices for rides, said inDrive country manager Georgy Malkov, adding that this was why the platform had fare negotiation as its core feature.
“[The formation of the social media group] was in response to a sharp increase in taxi prices when outside temperatures dropped precipitously [in Yakutsk],” Malkov told The Jakarta Post on Oct. 21.
“inDrive delivers something that other services can’t: a way to agree [on the fare] without unfair mediators. With our peer-to-peer business model, we’re putting the freedom of choice back in the hands of our users with a mutually agreed-upon price for a service,” he added.
In 2018, the company was reincorporated as inDriver Holdings LLC in Delaware, the United States, and now operates globally through a number of related entities and subsidiaries. Today, it is headquartered in Silicon Valley, specifically Mountain View, California, the US.
Malkov said inDrive was running its business in more than 700 cities in 47 countries, with ride-hailing as its core service. Nonetheless, in certain markets, it also offered courier, cargo delivery and urban services.
