Karhoo

» see karhoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Karhoo's pitch was the one sensible answer anybody gave to Uber in 2015, which is why it is worth remembering that it failed twice. It sat on top of the licensed taxi and private hire operators who already existed in a city, pulled their availability and prices into one app, and let you pick. The incumbent fleets got demand they did not have to fight for, and Karhoo took a cut without owning a single car.

Daniel Ishag founded it in London in 2014 and it launched properly in 2016, with New York and Singapore in the plan. The money that went in is disputed. The Financial Times put it around 250 million dollars, which is the figure every report used at the time, and Ishag has since said the company only ever raised 52 million and that the larger number was a misreading of what had been spent on marketing.

Either number was too much for what happened next. On 8 November 2016 Karhoo told its staff the service was stopping, and it went into administration the following day. Paul Cooper and Paul Appleton of David Rubin and Partners were appointed as joint administrators and started selling the assets. Around 120 people lost their jobs, and drivers who had completed bookings were owed money that took a long time to appear.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the first collapse ~

Ishag had stepped down as chief executive several days before the shutdown. What made the collapse notable in London was the shape of the people left holding it. Karhoo had spent heavily on promotional pricing, so the passengers using it were largely there because it was cheap, and the fleets supplying it were mid-sized minicab operators who had integrated with a partner that then evaporated inside a week.

~ what Renault wanted ~

In January 2017 the wreck was bought out of administration by a group backed by Renault, specifically RCI Bank and Services, its financial arm. Boris Pilichowski and Nicolas Andine came in as co-chief executives. It was an unusual purchase: a carmaker buying a failed ride-hailing aggregator, at a moment when every carmaker in Europe had been told by its board to have a mobility strategy.

The relaunched Karhoo was quieter than the original. It stopped trying to be a consumer app and became infrastructure, a white-label booking and dispatch layer that corporate travel desks and other people's apps could plug into to get a car. Renault later folded it under the Mobilize brand. It ran that way for seven years, which is longer than most of the mobility bets from that period lasted.

~ the important notice ~

The second ending was almost silent. On 15 May 2024 the karhoo.com homepage was replaced with a page titled Important notice, saying the business was no longer active. Its own words for it were that the decision had been taken that the business was no longer financially viable. Administrators went in again. Trade press in the private hire sector covered it the following day and almost nobody else picked it up, because by 2024 there were no passengers left to tell.

Nothing of this shape ever reached Turkey. The aggregator model was answered here by local apps that did the same job with the existing taxi fleets, and Uber spent 2018 and 2019 losing a loud public fight with Istanbul's drivers before coming back in a form the licensed trade could live with. Karhoo was solving the same problem in London and New York at the same moment, with more money and a worse outcome.

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