At a time when homegrown cab aggregator Ola and its US-based rival Uber seem to be drifting, a third contender is stepping on the gas.

While ride-hailing seems to have taken a backseat for Ola and as Uber feels stagnated in India’s Rs 40,000 crore (US$4.7 billion) ride-hailing market, Rapido has rapidly steered both drivers and customers in its favour.

Their status is vividly captured in their market share.

On the one hand, the big two’s combined dominance has come down to around 60–70% from over 90% three years ago, per Rohan Rao, a partner at the deal-advisory team of professional-services firm KPMG, whose focus area includes mobility.

On the other hand, nine-year-old Rapido, which dove into cab-aggregation business in December 2023, already gets nearly a third of its gross bookingsThe ArcRapido breaks Ola-Uber duopoly. What's fuelling its growth? worth US$1.2 billion from the segment. The latter now claims around 10–20% market share, despite focusing on just the top four metro cities: Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, per the estimates of three industry executives who spoke to The Ken.

And when it comes to experience with Uber and Ola, customers have been facing a hard time since Covid. Even cab fares have increased by 30–40% in the last year and a half, said Rao. Cancellations and wait times are on the rise, too, said an executive at a fleet operator that partners with cab aggregators. They, and four others from the ride-hailing ecosystem who spoke to The Ken, didn’t want to be named in order to avoid jeopardising their professional relationships.

The picture isn’t any different for drivers, the main service providers in the ecosystem. “Drivers are unhappy with earnings,” the above-mentioned fleet executive added.

While the two giants have cut drivers’ incentives, they’ve nearly doubled the commissions on each trip to 25–30% of the fare, said another fleet-operations executive. (That’s also prompted strikesIndia TodayWhy auto-taxi drivers are furious with Uber and Ola but not Rapido and protests from cab-drivers’ unions in recent times.)

Amid this, Rapido has targeted these frustrated drivers—by borrowing from auto-hailing platform Namma Yatri’s subscription-based model—and by extension, more customers.