Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan, two Harvard Business School graduates, founded MyTeksi; their “save the world” idea after hearing and experiencing enough horror taxi rides in Kuala Lumpur. They decided the broken taxi industry could be fixed using smartphone technology innovation and validated this idea by becoming the 1st runner-up at Harvard’s Business Plan competition, the first all-Asian team to do so in a really long time.
MyTeksi is one of the fastest growing for profit social start-up companies in Malaysia with a mission to revolutionise the local taxi industry. Runner-up in the 2011 Harvard Business School Business Plan Contest, its core product is a cloud based taxi-dispatch service with GPS-enhancements, allowing passengers to hail the nearest taxi with extreme ease.
We are the first in ASEAN to use smartphone to smartphone cloud-based technologies for taxi booking and dispatch. Since our official launch June 2012, taxi drivers have been using the MyTeksi smartphone-based technologies to receive bookings.
Our service is now available across Klang Valley, Seremban, Johor Bahru and some parts of Melaka in Malaysia, and also available in 3 other countries (Singapore, Philippines and Thailand). MyTeksi strives to provide greater certainty, convenience and safety to passengers when booking a taxi. E.g. Passengers are now able to book a taxi through more channels; from their smartphones and online web booking. Apart from that, the technology adopted by MyTeksi reduces the taxi-booking lead-time (from an average of 10-30 minutes to under a minute) and taxi-booking confirmation to provide greater certainty. We hope to help improve the safety perception towards a taxi ride by empowering passengers with detailed information of their drivers and traceability of their journey – being able to share their ride with their family and loved ones. The same platform will increase take home revenue and reduce wastage (time & cost) for taxi drivers through better efficiencies of matching taxi demand to taxi drivers.
MYTEKSI TIMELINE
• Formed MyTeksi as a for-profit social start-up
• Official launch in Klang Valley, Malaysia
• MyTeksi ties up with Maxis Mobile
• MyTeksi ties up with Guinness Anchor Berhad as part of their Drink Sensibly campaign
• MyTeksi expands to Johor Bahru, Malaysia
• MyTeksi and GrabTaxi featured in BBC News
• MyTeksi expands to Malacca
• Official Launch in Manila, Philippines as Grabtaxi PH
• GrabTaxi PH ties up with Globe
• Beta Launch in Bangkok, Thailand
• Beta Launch in Singapore
