How Rapido broke the Uber-Ola duopoly
How Rapido broke the Uber-Ola duopoly
In August 2025, Uber's CEO said his toughest rival in India was no longer Ola.
It was Rapido, an app that started in 2015 with bike taxis in Bengaluru.
And the way it got there forced both giants to change how they pay their own drivers.
For years, a cab in India meant Ola or Uber, a classic duopoly Duopoly = a market where just two companies control most of the business.
Both ran on the same deal: the driver does the ride, and the app keeps a share of every fare as commission.
Rapido flipped that deal.
From December 2023 for cabs, and February 2024 for autos, drivers pay it a small fixed fee and keep the full fare.
It calls this a SaaS model SaaS = you pay a fixed fee to use an app, like a Netflix plan.
On a busy day, every extra ride puts money in the driver's pocket, not the app's.
Ek aur baat, and this is the twist.
In February 2025, Uber moved its auto drivers in India to the same zero-commission model, "so as not to be at a competitive disadvantage".
By June 2025, Ola had switched autos, bikes and cabs too.
The two giants copied the bike-taxi app.
Investors noticed:
-> Sept 2024: valued at $1.1 billion
-> Sept 2025: $2.3 billion, after Swiggy sold its stake
-> May 2026: $3 billion
The Brutal Reality:
Rapido still isn't making a profit.
In FY25 it earned ₹934 crore and reported a loss of ₹258 crore, almost the same as the ₹252 crore it spent on ads that year.
And bike taxis, the product it started with, keep running into regulators.
Karnataka stopped them from June 2025 until the High Court lifted the ban in January 2026.
In October 2026, Pune police filed an FIR saying Rapido ran bike taxis there without a licence, and asked Google and Apple to remove its app, while its licence application is still pending.
Rapido changed who keeps the fare, and Uber and Ola had to follow.
Whether that model can also make money is still an open question.
✍🏻 Mantra Joshi
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