Flywheel has a new executive team, a fresh round of funding, and serious ambitions to scale bigger than competitors like Uber. The San Francisco-based company, which develops a hailing app for taxi drivers, today announced a $12 million Series C round that pushes total funding past $34 million. Flywheel also named a new executive team led by CEO Rakesh Mathur, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Amazon, Dropbox, and OpenTable.
With Uber having raised more than $1 billion and rival Lyft having picked up hundreds of million as well, a $12 million investment in an app to help the taxi industry compete might not seem like much. But to CEO Rakesh Mathur, who recently took the reins at Flywheel, it should be more than enough. Unlike Lyft and Uber, Mathur believes his company has something of an unfair advantage: the taxis are already out there on the streets looking for customers. What Flywheel does is help them find those customers and vice versa. The combination has proved popular since launching in San Francisco, where 80 percent of taxis are now running the app. With the new funding Flywheel plans to expand across the U.S. Mathur believes the company’s opportunity is quite large. He says that while Uber’s growth has been impressive, the long-run opportunity for the taxi industry is a strong one and that this isn’t a winner-take-all market. “The thing about transportation is that its all about getting the supply you want when you want it,” Mathur said, likening it to flying multiple different airlines depending on who has the best schedule or flies to where you are going. “It’s all about getting from Point A to Point B.”
