Bykerr: The beginning
Commuting inside your city? Planning to use public transport services like City bus or Metro? We are sure you would have faced the same challenges as we do: how do I get to the nearest public transit station, and then, to my destination from the last station? It is this regular struggle to find a reasonably priced commute for short distance trips inside Bengaluru that we are trying to solve.
If you are a commuter who lives or works at a 10 minute drive distance from the metro station, you would have to wait for an average of 20 minutes for a cab that would take you there. Often, these cabs cost twice or more than the metro ticket you bought. If it is a bus, it gets worse. Your home or office is a kilometer or two from the bus stop. But it is nearly impossible to convince an auto rickshaw to get you to your destination. On the rare occasion that they do agree, they would charge you exorbitant amounts, ranging anywhere between ₹30 — ₹80 per km.
The frustrating struggle to find short distance commute options, and the lack of last mile connectivity to the public transport stations is what led Hiranmay and Monalisha to start Bykerr (now Tummoc) in 2016. Narayan, a techie going through the same vagaries of commuting joined them soon after and took over the app building and tech infrastructure needs.
The Alpha version was launched in June 2017 in Bengaluru followed by the Beta launch in January 2018. By June 2018, Bykerr (now Tummoc) had 1000 users already. The highly unorganised sector was not easy to change overnight. A vibrant and enthusiastic user community helped us identify the shortcomings, and continuously make those incremental changes necessary to slowly but steadily move towards our vision.
The funding
Like any other bootstrapped startup, funding was a major challenge. Any system overhaul needs a large upfront investment, and we didn’t have any. Fortunately, this was the time that the startup ecosystem in India, especially Bengaluru, had begun maturing. There were many individual, corporate and government organisations that were looking for promising startups to invest in. We presented our solution at these forums and within a year we had won two competitions: STAMP 2018 and Elevate 2018. We also got a couple of grants to take our efforts forward.
With this encouragement, Bykerr (now Tummoc) expanded operations to Hyderabad in March 2019. A recently concluded partnership agreement with the Hyderabad metro (owned and operated by L&T Metro Rail Hyderabad Limited) gave us a big boost and opened new avenues in our journey to complement public transport services in the country.
By February 2020, many successes, failures, and nearly 30,000 rides later we had enough data to start analysing and identifying trends. Our vibrant and supportive commuter community kept giving us valuable inputs that helped us identify the core challenges they face when dependent on public transport systems.
The COVID challenge
It is around this time that the world as we knew it changed. The COVID — 19 pandemic was here, and the whole world retreated into their homes. There were no commuters, no public transport, no need for any first and last mile connectivity. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. This is exactly what we did! We decided to use this time to focus entirely on our learnings of the last 4 years. Our goal was to bring out a stronger, wider service that could scale to serve not just thousands, but millions.
Evolution into TUMMOC
Bykerr evolved into Tummoc, a multi — modal commute platform that helps you plan your intracity trips, while providing you the critical first and last mile connectivity. We added a trip planning service that would help commuters find the best (fastest or cheapest or most optimum) public transport route for their commute needs. Getting them to and from the public transit stations would continue to be taken care of by our first and last mile driver partners. Tummoc is in talks with other mobility service providers like ride hailing services, dockless self drive scooter providers, shared bicycle providers and many more to integrate their services into a single platform to increase ease of discovery. Bykerr was a monolith app, built for a few thousand users. Tummoc, on the other hand, is built on microservices based architecture. After all, we are building for millions!
We shall be launching the Tummoc app by July 2020. We urge you to join us in making Indian roads cleaner and less congested. The simplest way of doing that is to start switching to public transport. We understand you have reservations about the current state of public transport services, but we can turn things around for a better tomorrow. Keep commuting, keep sending us your feedback. We assure you we are always listening, and working towards our common goal of cleaner, greener and hassle — free urban commuting.
P.S.: To know more about us, please visit our website or write to us at support@tummoc.com
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