STARTUP STAGE: Wapanda wants to give control back to riders and NYC taxis

Wapanda

The Wapanda app connects consumers with ride-share companies as well as New York City taxis and lets them negotiate on fares. 

Wapanda aims to bring transparency for taxi drivers and riders simultaneously, while also helping medallion owners in New York City gain some footing against Uber and Lyft.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Our ultimate vision for Wapanda has been to connect the dots on how to make taxis the low-carbon model of sustainability within smart cities, and an integral provider in multimodal transportation. Recently we have taken significant steps toward that goal.

Companies like Tesla are looking to deploy their robo-taxis, and city-wide self-charging stations are currently being deployed in Los Angeles. We have capital partners interested in purchasing the medallion asset as a balance sheet trade. Having this asset allows us special licensing within the government to deploy the future electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle fleets.

We have all of the pieces in places for the next steps needed. Our unique technology platform has been granted a license for taxi pooling/shuttles, individual driver self-pricing and direct in-car dispatch to all drivers, which we consider the natural evolutionary steps in the space.

With more than 17 years of Wall Street experience, we opted for a low cost fee per transaction much like the exchange model instead of charging a commission for drivers. We also have extensive municipal connectivity and capital partners to further expand the infrastructure and platform.

What inspired you to create this company?

We have been inspired to build this from our previous experience in trading. We wanted to create a transparent marketplace for taxis to bring them back into the fold and gain some market share back from Uber and Lyft.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths

• Open source infrastructure and tools
• Connects multiple forms of transportation for consumers
• Allows direct consumer access to drivers' "vendor-less" self-pricing
• Obtained special TLC licensing for technology
• First taxi-pooling license issued

Weaknesses

• Unfunded
• Unproven model
• Small user base

Opportunities

• Reducing traffic and congestion
• Empowering people with choice and control in multimodal transportation
• Increasing cities' competitive advantage
• Reducing pollution from transportation
• Integrated multimodal payment systems

Threats

• Major ride-share vendors getting connectivity to municipalities

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

We are trying to empower people with choice and control in multimodal transportation, and we strongly believe that seeing all your ride options is an important decision for consumers. We are also providing transparency for taxi drivers and riders simultaneously. We are also trying to help medallion owners in New York City gain some footing and help increase the value for them.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

An innovative part of the Wapanda strategy is an investment fund to purchase taxi medallions. The core strategy with the investment fund is to capture drivers on the Wapanda platform through direct and indirect control of a large number of taxi medallions. This significantly lowers our driver acquisition costs and increases driver recruitment with direct access.

We believe modernized technology like Wapanda for New York City taxis is a multibillion-dollar opportunity, and at the same time the opportunity to be on the right side of social change by directly helping taxi drivers. This essentially is how we reduce the driver cost of acquisition.

On the consumer side, the marketing of being purchasers of medallions and the first people to have licensing to do taxi pools (like Via for taxis) will be how we get things started. Then, social media and marketing and direct advertising will help spread the word. We will also have to provide some promotions to consumers to use the product.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

New York City taxis are municipally managed and will continue to be in the future. The TLC commission has vetted our app and confirmed from the TLC commissioner that they are inviting e-hail technology providers to gain some control back in the ride-share ecosystem. The TLC directly stated that externalities associated with MaaS means that the municipally controlled vendor (taxis) are more important than ever.

Third-party vendors (such as Uber and Lyft) are not aligned properly and do not have externality constraints and objectives that a smart city needs.

How and when will you make money?

Six months.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

Co-founder Zahid Biviji is a former Wall Street senior executive with more than 17 years of experience. As a senior managing director, Biviji ran U.S. Equity Derivatives trading at Deutsche Bank. His businesses generated revenues in excess of $600MM a year.

Previous experience includes running Derivatives Flow Trading at Deutsche Bank, and Single Stock and Corporate Derivatives at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. Biviji was one of the youngest managing directors in Merrill Lynch history, with a highly successful track record. He graduated with honors majoring in Statistics at Harvard University. 

Co-founder Mihir Dange has worked with mayoral offices, congressmen and various municipal leaders in New Jersey and New York to authorize and implement a peer-to-peer platform modernizing the New York City taxi industry.

Dange is a previous Wall Street entrepreneur who started a commodity derivative market maker CME member firm and successfully grew it to over 25 employees.

Dange is a respected financial industry analyst having made multiple appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business Network, SKY News, PBS, TheStreet.com, Thomson-Reuters, BNN, Al Jazeera and Stock Twits.

Mihir graduated with a dual degree in Marketing and Finance from the Stern School of Business at NYU.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Having patience. It takes longer time and more conviction (after many iterations) to keep chasing after what is right.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We are not playing on the same playing field as other travel startups. We are a socially conscious, government tech technology platform that helps cities be interactive in smart city construct to help the government vendor of choice succeed.

What question might we have missed...?

The last piece to our puzzle is something we are working with city hall. It is called the Medallion Affordable Refinance Program. The Medallion Affordable Refinance Program (MARP) is an initiative designed to help medallion owners refinance their medallions. Medallion owners were previously only able to refinance with a loan to value ratio of 80% or less.