Cooperation minister Amit Shah confirmed the Bharat Taxi tie-up in a written reply to the Lok Sabha on 2 December, noting that the cooperative model allows drivers to retain 100% of fares and have board representation besides receiving annual dividends and a share of profits.
Namma Yatri won a multi-year tender following a three-month bidding process to customize its platform for the service, which is now piloting in Delhi and Gujarat under a zero-commission model. About 88,000 drivers are currently registered on the app, the second person said.
The Bharat Taxi app will be operated by Sahkar Taxi Cooperative Ltd, a multi-state cooperative registered under the MSCS Act, 2002. Membership requires an admission fee of ₹500, which includes the value of the allotted share.
The tie-up adds to Namma Yatri’s growing government collaborations. Over the past two years, the platform has expanded across Karnataka, Kerala (Kochi), Tamil Nadu (Chennai), Odisha and West Bengal. The Bharat Taxi deal signals Namma Yatri’s formal push into north India, a region it has struggled to penetrate until now.
Squeeze on Uber, Ola percentage commissions
Namma Yatri was the first to introduce the zero-commission model—a move ride-hailing rivals later mirrored. Rapido was the first to drop commissions, followed by Ola and Uber for two-wheelers and autorickshaws. The real shift, however, came when Ola extended the zero-commission model to its cab segment.
In August, Uber too began piloting a zero-commission model for cabs and said it plans to roll it out more broadly. While Rapido and Uber charge drivers ₹29 per day as a subscription fee, Ola’s daily fee is significantly higher at ₹67. Namma Yatri, in comparison, charges a flat fee— ₹25 for a day’s worth of trips or ₹3.5 per ride.
Behind the upstart app was the heft of Juspay, the Bengaluru payments firm that runs the rails for millions of digital transactions, and the architecture of Beckn—the open protocol co-created by Nandan Nilekani to keep digital markets open and free of monopoly. Nilekani was the first chairman of the Unified Identification Authority of India, which then spawned a host of public digital infrastructure apps such as Unified Payments Intereface, Digilocker, Digiyatra, among others.
Because it runs on Beckn, an open source architecture, Namma Yatri can plug directly into public infrastructure such as metro and bus APIs (application programming interfaces), as well as government-backed taxi programmes like Yatri Sathi in West Bengal and Kerala Savaari.
North India was a challenge, will that change?
While Namma Yatri scaled in south India and pushed east into Odisha and West Bengal, it found northern markets hard to crack, hindered by varying state regulations, union dynamics, consumer behaviour, and entrenched rivals.
The northern market is challenging because Gurgaon, Noida and Delhi fall under different state jurisdictions with varying regulations. “But with all three now aligned under the central government, this is the most favourable moment to enter the region,” said Amit Kaushik, an independent automotive industry expert.
He added that rapid scale will be crucial: “Without fast expansion, players will simply be overlooked. After BluSmart’s exit, there’s still a gap in Gurgaon and Noida.” Smaller aggregators are filling the space as Ola cedes market share but no single player has emerged as dominant, he added.
In FY24, Namma Yatri reported ₹2.2 crore in revenue and a ₹3.3 crore loss, with no other income and expenses of ₹5.3 crore. By comparison, Rapido posted ₹648 crore in revenue and a ₹371 crore loss, Ola’s ride-hailing arm generated ₹1,761 crore with a ₹10 crore loss, and Uber India led the pack with ₹3,860 crore in revenue and an ₹89 crore loss, according to MCA filings. The financials for fiscal 2025 are not immediately available.
So far, Namma Yatri has raised $11 million in a pre-Series A round that valued the company at $55 million.Its closest rival, Rapido, has pulled in about $574 million to date and became a unicorn in 2024. Rapido’s funding journey began with a $180,000 seed round in 2015 and peaked with a $245 million Series E in 2024–25, most of it arriving over the past three years.
Meanwhile, Namma Yatri’s cap table has shifted. Juspay, which incubated the platform, has begun stepping back—mobility was never a natural fit for its pure-play digital stack. This paved the way for Blume Ventures, Antler, and Google to invest roughly ₹92 crore. Juspay, however, remains the largest shareholder, holding 32% as of October 2025.
Queries sent to Namma Yatri on Monday, 8 December, did not elicit a response until press time.
