During our EU-Startups Conference last Friday in Munich, we hosted a pitch competition with eight awesome startups from Belgium, the UK, the Czech Republic, Finland and Germany taking part. The startup that eventually won the contest is Liftago!
Ondrej Kratky, Co-Founder and Marketing Chief of the young company, convinced the jury with both Liftago’s business model and his entertaining pitching style. The image above shows three members of the Liftago team together with the jury.
Liftago, which is currently headquartered in Prague, is an open marketplace for urban transportation. In contrast to most of its competitors, Liftago is building the marketplace on top of existing taxi infrastructure. In this way, the young company aims to create the most value for passengers, drivers, dispatch companies, as well as for travel operators and cities.
Instead of building a new costly infrastructure like Uber, Liftago uses high quality existing drivers who are already on the market (10% of all Prague drivers are registered at Liftago). Taxi drivers love the concept of Liftago and are recommending the new marketplace to their clients, meaning that the Prague-based company has an almost zero direct acquisition cost for drivers.
An interesting fact is that Liftago’s traction in Prague is very similar to Uber when it started in San Francisco (20,000-30,000 rides in the first 6 months after launch)!
Juraj Atlas, the CEO of Liftago, describes their goal as the following: “Liftago optimises taxi transportation now, but we aim to build an open marketplace of multi-modal transportation with services that are now struggling for wider adoption, bike-sharing/car-sharing, with one goal: to make public transportation so accessible so it will be more economical and convenient for people to leave their cars at home when they visit city centers.”
It seems that Litago faces a tough journey with all the ups and downs that any regular startup has to go through. But if the plan of Liftago’s ambitious team works out, the company could play an important role in the future of urban transportation and might become one of the major European startup success stories.
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