Mobility start-up Vogo will expand to five North Indian cities over the next three months, as its two-wheeler subscription product Vogo Keep boosts fleet utilisation to full capacity.

In addition to the rise in fleet utilisation figures, the company’s expansion to North India is also driven by how much additional subsidy the respective states are offering. “Delhi, Chandigarh and others are offering various benefits like State subsidies, free parking and subsidised electricity to shared mobility players like us,” Anand Ayyadurai, Co-founder and CEO, Vogo told BusinessLine .

In August, Vogo launched operations in Mangaluru and Udupi taking its South India footprint to five cities including Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mysuru. Two-wheeler subscription product Vogo Keep was launched in June 2020 and today about 95 per cent of the company’s fleet operates under this model.

Vogo has about 20,000 vehicles and almost 70 per cent of these vehicles are in Bengaluru (which reached full utilisation in August 2021), and about 30 per cent of the total fleet is in Hyderabad (which reached full utilisation in October 2020).

In Hyderabad, just before the Covid second wave, the company increased the fleet size by around 500 vehicles and those additional vehicles are also being used today. Now, the company is experimenting with expansion in new cities and has launched a couple of 100 vehicles in Mangaluru and Udupi.

“After a year of having ups and downs in terms of growth etc, we have finally reached a place where we are fully utilised and we can actually expand. The plan is to double our fleet from where it is today,” said Ayyadurai.

Vogo raised its $11.5 million Series C round in February 2021 and plans to use all this funding to expand its geographical footprint and add more vehicles in existing cities. Vogo is backed by investors like Matrix Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, Ola and LGT Lightstone.

Currently, over 90 per cent of Vogo vehicles are fueled by gasoline, though there are still some 100 electric vehicles but they are not a large part of the fleet. A majority of the vehicles added in the two new cities are electric and the company is now experimenting with charging, battery swapping infrastructure, and the use-cases that will work for electric vehicles.

The Vogo Keep model is slightly low in terms of per day revenue generation as compared to Vogo's on-demand product (Vogo Now) because in Vogo Now the fuel cost was also being charged to the customer. But overall, Vogo Keep's subscription model is a much more profitable product for the company, Ayyadurai noted.

The company is experimenting with various price options for the electric two-wheeler subscriptions, where the customer could pay a slightly higher per day rental but still save money in terms of fuel costs and maintenance. Currently, 30 percent of the Vogo Keep customers subscribe to the service for a 15-30 day period and this user base is said to be almost entirely gig workers. The per-day rental charged for Vogo's gasoline vehicles is around ₹150.

Another shared mobility company Yulu had also started bike rentals for gig workers last year and claims to have seen a great market response. During India’s second covid wave, Yulu’s revenue share from gig worker rentals has grown from being in the single-digit to almost 20 percent of the total revenue. Following this, Yulu launched a new category of vehicles specifically for gig workers called Yulu DEX.

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