The world’s biggest ridesharing platform BlaBlaCar has announced they acquired a Hungarian startup Autohop and, therefore, now they are present also in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Croatia.
BlaBlaCar is present in 16 countries according to their main page country selection and based on Crunchbase data so far raised 110m usd in 2 rounds, from some of the the world A-list investors like Index Ventures, Accel Partners among others.
BlaBlaCar is headquarted in Paris and in July 2014 got the biggest investment that one French startup ever got – 100m usd. It enabled to fast open new markets or to acquire existing market leaders.
Markets like above mentioned are great because GDP is significant lower than the average EU GDP but the transportation costs are pretty much the same so we can expect further growing a ridesharing community. However, question is how much they will be able to monetize platform in those markets comparing to some wealthier markets.
We will see if some new ridesharing platforms will evolve in this market but anyway, having the biggest player in this industry present in this market can most likely mean only better conditions to travelers as community will grow more and big and safe environment is the most important factors in ridesharing platform.
