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SCALING UP ekar raised a $12.5M Series B, the 5th largest venture round in the Middle East in 2019. Despite the pandemic, the company is still well on its way to disrupt the car rental market and reshape mobility across the Gulf. Vilhelm Hedberg, Founder and CEO, eKar discusses how the company has coped with the disruption due to the pandemic and has a positive outlook up ahead
Vilhelm Hedberg Founder and CEO, eKar
How has ekar as an organization responded to the challenges of the pandemic from its early days? Have the employees been working from home?
SAAS platform that allows car rental and leasing companies to tokenize their fleet to rent digitally. We are going to have a huge impact on the car rental industry over the next year.
ekar management was quick to recognize that measures needed to be acted upon swiftly in order to ensure the safety of both internal and external stakeholders. We initiated the relevant contingency protocols and had the entire ekar team working remotely within 48 hours, prior to any governmental requirements to work from home. We were well prepared.
Further, we have a brand new service called subscription sharing, whereby a customer can lease a vehicle for 1-6 months and then re-share the car on the ekar platform for credits when not in use. This is launching in September, and we already have thousands of cars committed to the program.
Have you started out operations at the office or continue work from home mode? We are easing back into the office, ensuring that we follow all governmental protocols. How was business impacted and do you expect a return to a more positive trend soon? Is this already happening - can you mention with respect to all markets you address? The mobility industry took a hit during the COVID outbreak. ekar was averaging 3,000 trips daily prior to the outbreak, and quickly took an 80% drop in April as certain cities were under a full lockdown. ekar has seen positive trending, with its Saudi service on track to a record month for June 2020. We are launching the Riyadh Airport service this month, and will continue to onboard car rental cars to our service via ekar Fleet, ekar’s
How do you look to plan the road to full scale operations and by when? or do you have plans to have a percentage of your workforce working from home as so many companies globally seem to be considering? We are fully up and running and are already scaling up the fleet. In terms of work from home, we are in the midst of reviewing this right now. Like many other companies globally, this crisis has opened our eyes to the fact that people can work from home. Remote work can not only save costs in rent, but can provide ekar access to talent around the world. What have been the collaborative technologies you relied on to keep the operations on as normal as possible? We relied heavily on Zoom meetings to keep operations as normal as possible. For our customer service team who need to attend to our customers and their queries, we also relied heavily on our CRM system that we had to tweak in order to ensure it could be utilized from home. June 2020 / SMARTSMB
