Ridengine is India’s first online peer-to-peer bike and car sharing platform that allows users to rent self-driven vehicles directly from vehicle owners. It serves as a rental discovery platform helping small businesses and individual vehicle owners reach potential renters through an online marketplace. Ridengine strives to bring transparency to the existing vehicle rental marketplace by allowing owners retain full control over their vehicle rental – including availability and pricing. These features help potential renters get a curated list of self-drive vehicles within their proximity and price range. Customers can decide the best available option at one place, rather than combing through Google searches and scattered online reviews. Ridengine was born out of the vision to organize the unstructured rental sector of self-driven cars and bikes in India. Bike or car sharing is considered a taboo in India as we don’t trust sharing our beloved ride with strangers but we do share with friends, family and relatives. The Ridengine team firmly believes that their technology is designed to solve the challenges in the Indian vehicle rental space. The platform solves the most important challenge of establishing trust between owners and renters through the use of social and corporate identity validations. Ridengine’s user on-boarding process will also include a background verification process through partners. Any vendor or individual owning a car or motorbike (*meeting Ridengine requirements) can list their vehicle on Ridengine platform and start earning money through rentals.
Ronald Reddy is the lead developer and spokesman for Ridengine, previously serving as the CTO of AdmitSchool (now acquired by Starr Education Group). He met Dinesh Rao, one of the founders of Ridengine at a Hackathon event held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA – where all three founders were graduate students. They also have another important person leading operations in India: Neelesh Kumar, who previously worked at Google Maps in India. The team members may all have very diverse profiles, but they certainly all love road trips. As a startup, they faced a lot of challenges to pull off their idea. The biggest hurdle was to build trust among rental partners to list their vehicles on the Ridengine platform and making users comfortable with sharing rides with strangers. They learned to take early feedback from both internal and external customers, adapting according to market needs.
Unlike existing market players, Ridengine does not own vehicles. Ridengine enables rental partners (vendors) and interested individuals by providing them with a discovery platform, while acting as a marketplace to allow car or bike owners to connect with renters in an easy and efficient way. Ridengine’s economic model complements the existing ecosystem, catering to the needs of all existing stakeholders. In India the sharing – rental space is almost empty. In the busy and overcrowded roads of India, vehicle sharing is the best way to reduce our carbon footprint, while meeting the needs of the growing population. Ridengine serves both sides of the marketplace by providing a platform to rent the best cars and bikes from people nearby – while allowing owners earn up to Rs 10,000/month just for renting their vehicle when not in use. Zoomcar, Carzonrent, and JustRide are a few of Ridengine’s competitors – although they are very different, they serve the self-drive rental market too; but Ridengine has an edge – as none of the competitors allow two wheeler rentals, and as Ridengine would be the first in India to introduce peer to peer rental. Peer to peer rental will give Ridengine an edge over their competition by offering a friendlier rental experience and cheaper prices. In pre-launch stage itself, the fleet size has grown from 13 bikes and 3 cars to 58 bikes and 11 cars in 9 days. Currently, Ridengine has a major presence in Hyderabad and Chennai – but they have plans to expand into eight other major cities by the end of 2015. They monetize by levying a 10% service charge on each rental from the owner booking price and a 5% charge from customer.
You can use the promo code DOPE2015 for 10% off on your Ridengine booking.