Rapido leveraging tech extensively to solve the urban mobility puzzle

Soma Tah

Technologies such as Cloud, Automation, and Machine Learning have became the force multiplier for Rapido, as they have been able to manage business efficiently, transform at scale and pivot business whenever needed

Homegrown bike-taxi platform, Rapido has embraced an extensive array of technologies to build a robust and scalable business. Besides cost optimization, adoption and innovative application of cutting-edge technology was particularly helpful for the company during the COVID lockdown period. It gave them an opportunity to pivot business whenever needed.

Srivatsa Katta, Head of Engineering, Rapido tells the story behind. The mobility solution provider has a compact team of 35 engineers. But technology became a force multiplier for the team- they have been able to kickstart new business verticals in a matter of 3-5 weeks which helped them serve end users in turn as well as the businesses. Within a short time span the urban mobility solutions provider has managed to scale up its operations significantly offering bike-taxis, autos, and hyper-local delivery services across 100-odd cities in India.  

“Digital Native companies have the edge in a social distancing world. The key for them is to recalibrate services and offerings with the changing consumer behavior. Our key priority a few months back was making Rapido an affordable and safe ride for every person who has to travel in the new reality. We wanted to ensure that we leverage our tech capabilities to the maximum capacity and churn out more solutions to address challenges that people face in the new normal. We feel the new normal should be considered as an enabler and not a crippler. It should enable businesses to think beyond and provide solutions that can sustain long term challenges and uncertainties, with the support of a dependable technology infrastructure,” explained Srivatsa.  

Rapido’s priority was to enable more people to commute within the city in an affordable, accessible and safer way, and now the focus is to help people move things. In the long term, focus is more on helping moving people and moving goods as per their needs and requirements, he added. 

Here’s how Rapido has evolved themselves in the past few months leveraging technology.  

Making the app experience a breeze 

Rapido wanted its riders and customers to be able to locate each other more easily to improve the customer experience and reduce costs. Another desired feature was optimised routing between destinations for improved travel times at all stages of the process. These processes had to be lightweight to service the 15L+ bike owners/riders (called captain) using its platform. Hence Rapido sought to optimize its mobile application across multiple metrics through the deployment of a powerful mapping tool, i.e. a Google Maps Platform solution that incorporated a variety of the available APIs to meet the needs of the taxi service and their customers. The Google Analytics for Firebase helps the bike-taxi service operator to measure customer engagement with its app, enabling the business to make informed decisions about where to direct its resources. 

Leveraging the power of data 

Rapido also started investing a lot in the data platform and machine learning algorithms to convert the business data to actionable insights. “We could innovate a lot in terms of business such as sizing and meeting the demands, doing the surge pricing, analyzing business performance which includes seeing how the cities fared against each other at any given point of time, etc. and how we scale our systems based on those metrics,” explained Srivatsa.  

Embracing Cloud and Automation to transform at scale 

Within a span of 4-6 months, Rapido moved 95% of its applications onto Google Cloud, primarily using internal resources, and is now running 98% of its apps and workloads in Google Cloud.  “Google Cloud’s native integration with Kubernetes and the speed with which the open source community updates the container orchestration system played a key role in our decision to consolidate onto Google Cloud,” said Srivatsa.  

Rapido now uses Google Kubernetes Engine to run its applications in a secure, managed and scalable containerized infrastructure. Cloud SQL runs the organization’s relational databases, while Cloud KMS manages cryptographic keys stored in third-party vault software.  

Vision API enables Rapido to automate and accelerate the onboarding of new captains. When a new captain uploads licenses and vehicle registration details to the application, the platform verifies the documents using the Google Cloud service–meaning the entire process can be completed in just a few minutes without any human intervention in 80 to 90% of the cases. 

Rapido's embedded penalty mechanisms also does not require any manual intervention as it gets triggered on the basis of certain signals such as the speed being a signal, taking alternative routes without the customer consent being a signal as well as customer  feedback. The system pushes the captains to strictly adhere to certain guidelines.

Rapido also uses a range of Google Cloud Firebase services for the app development, testing, and modification. In addition, it is using the Firebase Test Lab app-testing infrastructure to test its Android and iOS apps across a range of device configurations, view the outcomes, and make changes as needed. It uses the Firebase Remote Config to change the app's behavior and appearance on the fly in response to the results of A/B testing across sections of its user base. Cloud Firestore provides a NoSQL cloud database to store and sync data for the Rapido app. 

Protecting the users' privacy 

Rapido is handling over millions of transactions and dealing with multiple stakeholders in between its bike-taxi and logistics business. However, for such a B2B2C expansion, Rapido needed to ensure the communication privacy for all stakeholders – customer, rider and partner company. The company needed a solution to optimize the delivery cycle through timely and contextual communication between all stakeholders without compromising on privacy at any touchpoint.   

Using Airtel IQ, Rapido has been able to facilitate seamless and timely communication between the stakeholders while ensuring zero privacy incidents. While the biggest advantage of on-boarding Airtel IQ for Rapido has been the expansion of its partner network without any privacy or integration incidents, leveraging Airtel IQ, which is natively supported by Airtel telecom network, Rapido has also been able to:

- Provide better experience to all stakeholders due to wider network reach and stronger connectivity

- Improve delivery process efficiency due to 99.9% network uptime

- Gain confidence of both customers and partners on service reliability

- Ensure 100% privacy on every transaction 

Moving forward 

As a platform, Rapido is well equipped to be able to pivot to new businesses quickly as long as it involves managing supply and demand within the mobility and the logistics space. It has a long-term vision as well. “Just the way UPI has become the popular standard for transferring money,  our north star vision is to standardize the logistics application programming interfaces (APIs) so that Rapido becomes the platform of choice for anyone who wants to leverage the platform as a service for mobilizing either things or people,” said Srivatsa.