Taxi service InDrive from Yakutia transferred business in Russia to a Kazakh company

The international taxi service InDrive (before rebranding in 2022 - InDriver) transferred the main Russian legal entity Software Development Center to the Kazakh structure Indels, follows from SPARK data. Under the consonant name - INDELS - the company intends to provide urban and international travel services in RUSSIA and the CIS and is now actively looking for employees, three sources in the it market told RBC.

Headquartered in California, InDrive is a start-up that currently operates in 700 cities in 47 countries, according to its own data. The share of Russia in the total volume of trips serviced by the company was about 7% by the spring of 2022, Arsen Tomsky, the founder of InDrive, told the Kazakh edition of Tengri News.

InDrive was founded by Tomsky in 2013 in Yakutsk. Initially, the company operated as a taxi service based on the peer-to-peer model (the user directly negotiates the cost of the trip with the driver and sets the price for it himself): the model grew out of the Independent Drivers group founded by students on the VKontakte social network in response to a sharp increase prices by local taxi services due to the drop in street temperature.

Over the years, InDrive has grown into an international company that ranks second among ride-hailing services (aggregator and car sharing services) in terms of the number of monthly app installs in the GOOGLE Play and App Store, according to the InDrive website. In addition to passenger services, it provides freight transportation, as well as courier delivery.

Financial performance and shareholder structure are not disclosed. According to Tomsky, in 2016, VK (formerly Mail.ru Group) offered to buy 90% of InDrive for $68 million. In 2021, during the next round of investments, InDrive was valued at $1.23 billion: the service raised $150 million from investment funds the first echelon - Insight Partners (became a leading investor), Bond Capital and General Catalyst, Tomsky said.

In Russia, InDrive is not among the top five taxi services, according to a study by the Government Analytical Center.

How and when the owners of the InDrive business in Russia changed

According to SPARK, the main Russian legal entity of the company - the Software Development Center - was transferred back in August 2022 to a certain Softforming LLC, created a few months before. Previously, the HEAD structure for the Russian company was the Cypriot Suol Innovations Ltd, which owns the international business InDrive. At the beginning of February 2023, Indels Limited Liability Partnership registered in Kazakhstan became the owner of Softforming. From the extract from the register of legal entities in Kazakhstan, it follows that Indels belongs to the former operating DIRECTOR of InDrive in Russia, Marina Arzhakova, and three other individuals.

From the description of the vacancy for a product designer at the Software Development Center, which RBC correspondent found on the job search service Karyerist.ru, it follows that this company intends to work under the INDELS brand. About herself, she indicated that she was a start-up application for peer-to-peer transactions in Russia, accredited as an IT company (this information was confirmed by one of the market participants to RBC).

Officially, InDrive has not announced that it will stop working in Russia. But, according to an interlocutor of RBC in the taxi market, InDrive representatives said that the company formally left Russia, localizing with other owners under the new INDELS brand. Another source in the e-commerce market says that the new team now has about 200 employees, it intends to develop a taxi service application, and the company plans to officially announce organizational changes in late spring.

A spokesperson for InDrive declined to comment. It was not possible to contact representatives of INDELS.

What happened to InDrive over the past year

After the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, the founder of InDrive announced on his FACEBOOK page (owned by the American company Meta, which is recognized as extremist in Russia and banned) that he had closed his large regional media portal Ykt.Ru, which had been operating since 1999. Then he said that the share of Russia in the core business of InDrive is small and continues to decline, and "the team will become more and more international."

In May last year, FORBES, citing an InDrive representative, wrote that the taxi service was relocating some of its employees to Kazakhstan. In the fall, Tomsky explained to Tengri News that while the Russian market share of the company’s business is small in terms of the number of trips made, Russia, including Yakutsk, where Tomsky is from, had half of the employees who serviced the activities of the international startup. Against the backdrop of Western sanctions, InDrive began their relocation to Alma-Ata. In March 2023, Tomsky, in an interview with the regional publication SakhaDay, said that the company relocated about 1 thousand people from Russia to Kazakhstan.

He explained that the sanctions imposed after the start of the special military operation "forbid international companies to keep employees in Russia." Therefore, according to him, there was a choice: stop developing international business and work only in Russia, or continue to build a global company that "will positively affect the lives of hundreds of millions or more people around the world."

The fact that sanctions forced them to leave the Russian market and divide the InDrive business, says one of RBC's interlocutors in the IT market. Ilya Zharsky, managing partner of the Veta expert group, notes that foreign companies do not have a direct ban on keeping employees in Russia. On the other hand, according to him, in general, the taxi market is subject to sanctions due to the high degree of technological effectiveness. Russian services are trying to enter foreign markets, and there is a possibility of blocking such transactions, limiting transactions or equity participation in the capital of companies, he admits.

The international part of InDrive, based on information on the company's website, belongs to Suol Innovations Ltd, which, according to the Cypriot registry, is owned by InDriver Holdings Inc., registered in Delaware, usa . At the end of 2022, the company rebranded, changing its name to InDrive instead of InDriver. Instead of the main colors - blue, green and red - InDrive began to use light green. The company's slogan has also changed, now it sounds like People Driven ("People rule!").

In 2022, the company increased revenue by 88%, and by the end of 2023 it plans to break even, BLOOMBERG wrote, without citing absolute figures. About 60% of the company's revenue comes from the Latin American market, as well as Kazakhstan and Egypt. Over the past year, InDrive has also been released in Georgia, Zimbabwe and Australia.