Its been 6 years since we started out on a Wicked ride (now Bounce). We didn't know we will end up solving for mobility, we just started with an experiment with one motorcycle to see if it works. A lot of luck and good folks made this ride happen

I still wonder why so many people out of no where appeared and were kind and helped us. Recalling few names and moments :) Rajasthan was the first city to offer us a license. ATC Mr Mukul Raj said "Law mein he toh dedenge, use me kya he, ajao"

we knew nothing abt Jaipur, someone told us tourist cities will be interested in Rental licenses, try Jaipur, I was keeping an eye on cheap tickets to Jaipur, booked one when it was low, tried my luck calling on landline of transport dept and after fw calls got connected..

got connected to the right person who called us over and the journey began with our first office in Jaipur. Thanks to our first Angel Capitan Prashant Priya we had money to pay for rental deposits etc., seed vehicles and scale Wicked Ride.

we scaled motorcycle rentals to few 100s only to realise it is not a large business to be in, pivoted to solve for commute & we went ahead and bid for Metro tender and spent almost 90% of our angel raise for deposits. Luxury mcycle rentals was funding our pilots on commute

Motorcyle rentals funding commute business? It will take its own sweet time.. We didn't know much abt VC eco-system but we went ahead speaking to who ever gave us time. Participated in every mobility/startup challenge. Got a small grant of Rs 13 lakhs from WRI+Toyota MF

with this we wanted to start a real pilot on pick up anywhere and drop anywhere or A2B rides. We didnt know the word dockless yet :) by this time we also had met this gentlemen Mr. Dharma who had agreed to give us 100 scooters on lease :)

So no app yet for A2B rides, we just stopped commuters at d metro station, told them you can pick up the scooter here & drop anywhere in Whitefield & our person thr will pick it up. Mind you, these were key scooters, we hd placed people in whitefield in top 10 drop off palces

all transactions were done on whats app groups and collecting money on paytm :)we did a lot of things like branding on the scooters to keep the show going on. one tyres co. gave us 700 odd bucks per scooter per month for advertising the brand on our scooters. Toughest times :(

Finally we met an angel who gave us USD 1.5 mil and it got wired in 15 days!!! Thanks to Vishal our banker and our Angel LG Chandrasekar, we built our first prototype of keyless scooter. Meanwhile we were in touch with sequoia for sometime now and they had seen us do things

Rishabh and Shailesh finally looked excited (we first spoke to sequoia in 2016 and this was now 2017 end). We got introduced to Accel through Rahul Bhotra(swiggy) & we met Anand Daniel and Karan. We finally closed a round :)

round was approx USD 9 million and the ride started scaling Bounce. Sep 2018 we got our scooters working and started scaling :)Making iot work was our biggest challenge from June 2018 to Sep 2018 :) Jan 2019 we were doing 20k plus daily rides.

Journey from 2018 to 2019 was a rocket ship we scaled from 0 to 100k plus daily rides in this time, raised two more round of capital we partnered with more investors Chirate, Omidyar, B capital, Falcon Edge, Maverick, Qualcom

All of this wouldn't have been possible without a lot of people taking a bet on us. I really am thankful for the team which believed in the crazy vision of making mobility a fundamental right and gave their everything for this & investors who gave us gun powder & support.

Ride ain't fun if it doesn't have the curves and bounces :) Easier said than lived :) 2020 has been a tough one for a lot of us. We know this wont be the only bump in the road, we are buckled up and ready for the Bouncy ride :)

other memorable pics