Madhapur to Manhattan

It started off as an app that aimed to help Hyderabadis move from A-to-B efficiently and economically and now, carpooling app Zify has now found its way into the streets of New York, London and Dublin with a beta launch set for later this month.

Also,  founder and CEO of Zify, Anurag Singh Rathor is currently in New York attending the prestigious The Next Web Summit. TNW conferences connect the best of the world’s entrepreneurs with top names from the international start-up community.

“We are one of the 24 start-ups from all around the world that was selected for the summit. They had applications from over 40,000 start-ups to be able to pitch on the international stage,” says Anurag. The launch across the cities also highlights the transportation challenges faced by the world’s millions.

“These cities are some of the most congested and our target is to become the number one intra-city carpooling company for daily travel needs,” he says, adding that they have plans to launch around the business districts of these cities first. In Hyderabad too, Zify started off promoting carpooling solutions across its IT district.

The global launch plans had started in early 2015, when Anurag along with the co-founder and CTO of Zify, Pramod Kumar were in Ireland for a start-up summit. “We had already been collecting data but during our stay in Ireland, we spoke to locals, to the start-up community and even investors. We then returned and got in touch with our friends in the UK and US and continued to build a database,” says Pramod.

Much of this expansion could be fed by a recent funding of $190,000 from Sean O’Sullivan and another Hyderabadi investor. Interestingly, O’Sullivan had also funded Netflix in its early stages.

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