Why We Started RydX: The Founding Account

The Screenshot That Started It

It started with a screenshot. A colleague showed me his phone — a fare of ₹340 for a ride I knew cost roughly ₹65 on a dry afternoon. He had paid it because he had no choice. Bike at the service centre, raining hard, every app showing a similarly inflated number.

I had seen situations like this before. But this one stayed with me — not the number itself, but the fact that there was no alternative.

Entering the Market as a Driver

Rather than design a solution from assumptions or industry reports, I chose to enter the market as an operator first. I signed on as a Rapido Captain and rode for roughly 10 hours a day, across different parts of the city, to see how the system actually behaves on the ground — not how it looks from a dashboard.

That period gave me a working understanding of driver economics, dispatch, supply-demand imbalance at different times of day, and the everyday problems drivers face that rarely show up in a slide deck.

From Operating to Validating

Once that operator-level understanding was in place, my co-founder Faizan Murtaza — a childhood friend who has supported the venture from its early stages — and I moved to direct market validation. Starting around November 2025, we personally visited riders and drivers at real-world locations across Delhi NCR, explained the RydX concept, and recorded structured feedback through roughly March.

That process — organic, in-person, without paid acquisition or incentives — produced 16,716 email-verified pre-launch registrations: 9,234 Riders and 7,482 Drivers.

The Structural Insight

Platforms earning a percentage of every fare have a built-in incentive tied to higher fares, including surge. A platform charging a flat subscription instead doesn't earn more from a higher fare — which removes that specific incentive. The same logic applies to Captain earnings: a commission model means Captains give up a share of every rupee, always. RydX's Phase 1 model uses a flat subscription instead, with 0% commission until a zone has proven it can sustain itself.

What We Are Building

Not a pan-India platform on day one. A small number of genuinely dense micro-zones in Delhi NCR — density before geography, driver trust before commission — building toward a controlled pilot. Two founders, zero external capital raised to date, and 16,716 people who told us, organically, that they want this to exist.