India’s ride-hailing industry has largely been written by and for metro cities. The infrastructure, the investment, the attention, it has all flowed toward the top eight or ten urban centres. Meanwhile, taxi operators in Salem, Madurai, and dozens of smaller towns have been left to figure things out on their own.

Pinku B, Founder of Taxina, saw that gap from the backseat of a local cab.

In an exclusive conversation with Indian Startup Times, Pinku shared the thinking behind Taxina, the hard lessons from scaling in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets, and why he believes the next decade of Indian mobility will be decided not by valuation headlines, but by who actually serves the people.

The Moment That Changed the Plan

Before Taxina, Pinku spent close to two decades building and running a software company in the United States. It was a successful run, the kind that gives a founder both financial runway and technical fluency. But it never felt complete.

“I always wanted to build something that had a real-world impact,” he says. “Not just software for software’s sake.”

The turn came during one of his visits back to India. He was travelling through a smaller Tamil Nadu city when he got into conversation with his cab driver. The man had been running the same route for eleven years. He owned his vehicle, had a loyal set of regular customers, and knew every shortcut in town, but he had no insurance, no access to formal credit, no digital presence, and no way to grow beyond what he could manage manually.

That conversation wasn’t an isolated case. Pinku spoke to more drivers. The pattern held. These weren’t people who lacked ambition or capability. They lacked access to systems that most urban operators take for granted.

That was the trigger. Not a market research report. Not a pitch deck. A single conversation that turned into a hundred, and eventually into a company.

Rather than building another aggregator layered on top of the same commission-heavy playbook, Pinku set out to design something structurally different: a platform that treated drivers as business owners, not gig workers.

Building More Than Just an App

Taxina began with a pilot in Salem, Tamil Nadu, a deliberate choice. Salem isn’t a startup darling. It doesn’t have a buzzing tech scene or a ready pool of early adopters. That was precisely the point. If the model worked there, it would work anywhere.

What emerged from that pilot wasn’t a feature list. It was a set of real outcomes that Taxina now delivers across its network.

Drivers who join Taxina don’t just get ride bookings; they get a structured path toward running a proper business. Through the platform’s academy initiatives, operators learn skills that go beyond driving: customer service, vehicle maintenance planning, and financial management. Many drivers who entered the platform without any formal business knowledge now run multi-vehicle operations.

Financial access has been another area of tangible difference. In markets where taxi operators have historically been shut out of formal lending, Taxina has facilitated insurance coverage and loan access for thousands of drivers, people who had previously relied on informal moneylenders or simply gone without.

The push into electric vehicles has also moved beyond awareness. Taxina has worked to make EV adoption practical and informed, helping drivers understand not just why to switch, but how to make the economics work in their specific city and route profile.

The result is a retention rate that reflects something deeper than platform loyalty; it reflects genuine livelihood improvement.

Winning Trust in Markets That Have Seen Promises Before

Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets are not naive. They’ve watched platforms arrive with fanfare and exit quietly. Building credibility here requires something advertising cannot buy.

Taxina’s approach was to work through people already trusted in each community, local vendors, established operators, and grassroots stakeholders, rather than parachuting in with a brand campaign. This partnership-led distribution model kept customer acquisition costs low, but more importantly, it kept trust intact.

“Trust is built through relationships, not reach,” Pinku says. “We’d rather grow slowly in a market and build something real than rush in and burn goodwill we can never recover.”

Milestones That Signal Real Scale

Taxina’s growth over the past few years reflects the durability of this approach.

The platform has onboarded close to 60,000 drivers across Tamil Nadu, with the network now facilitating over 1.5 lakh rides per month. The company operates across 12+ cities in Tamil Nadu, with a model designed for replication across geographies rather than customisation from scratch each time.

On the funding side, Taxina has secured investor interest, including commitments following its Shark Tank appearance, raising capital at a valuation of approximately ₹25 crore. The company is currently in its Pre-Series A phase, focused on accelerating its technology infrastructure and preparing for national expansion.

The target: presence in at least 50 districts across India within the next few years, alongside a parallel international strategy positioning Taxina as a white-label technology provider for mobility businesses in markets like the UK and Australia.

Leadership That Looks Like Ownership

Pinku describes his leadership philosophy in one phrase: “team anchor.” But what that means in practice at Taxina is less conventional than the label suggests.

Early in the company’s growth, Pinku made a deliberate decision to hire people who disagreed with him. “If everyone in the room agrees with the founder, the founder is the only one thinking,” he says. “I needed people who would push back, especially on the ground.”

That philosophy showed up in how Taxina built its city teams. Rather than deploying a central playbook, local operators were given genuine ownership over market decisions. City leads weren’t account managers executing from headquarters; they were business owners within a shared framework. That distinction matters, and it’s visible in how the teams perform and how long they stay.

The culture Pinku has tried to build is one where clarity about mission substitutes for micromanagement. “People work differently when they understand the why,” he says. “We try to make the why unavoidable.”

The Framework Most Founders Miss

Pinku’s perspective on company-building is shaped by a distinction he returns to often: the difference between desirability, feasibility, and viability.

Most founders, he argues, spend their early years asking the first two questions: does someone want this, and can we build it? The third question, can this business actually sustain itself?,  tends to arrive too late, usually in the form of a runway crisis.

“I’ve watched too many startups build products people love and still fail,” he says. “Love doesn’t pay salaries. The business model has to work.”

For Taxina, this meant resisting some of the growth levers that look attractive in the short term. Subsidised rides, aggressive onboarding incentives, funded market share, Pinku has watched competitors deploy all of these and then quietly retreat. Taxina’s subscription-based model, where drivers pay a flat fee rather than surrendering a percentage of every fare, is a direct expression of this thinking. It aligns incentives. It creates predictable revenue. It doesn’t require the platform to grow at all costs just to stay solvent.

“Viable isn’t a boring word,” he says. “It’s the most important word.”

Advice for Founders, Including the Part No One Likes to Hear

Pinku’s counsel to early-stage founders covers the expected ground: resilience, patience, focus on the problem over the product. But there’s one lesson he leads with now that he wishes someone had told him earlier.

“Don’t confuse busyness with progress,” he says. “In the first two years of Taxina, we were doing too many things. We had pilots in too many cities, too many partnerships in discussion, too many features on the roadmap. We looked busy. We weren’t moving.”

The correction was painful. Taxina pulled back, consolidated its operations in fewer markets, and chose depth over breadth. That discipline, deciding what not to do, turned out to be more valuable than any product decision the team made.

For founders who are still in that early stage of doing everything: the edit is coming. Better to make it yourself than to have the market make it for you.

The Broader Picture

India’s gig economy is at an inflection point. Regulatory frameworks for aggregators are gradually catching up to the scale of the sector, and the conversation around platform accountability, to drivers, to commuters, to cities, is getting louder.

In that context, companies that built their model around operator welfare from the start are not just ethically better positioned. They’re structurally better positioned. The platforms that treated drivers as disposable inputs will face growing friction, from policy, from public opinion, and eventually from operators who have better options.

Taxina’s expansion across India and its international ambitions will be watched as a test of whether a driver-first model can scale without compromising what made it work in the first place. If it does, it won’t just be a business success. It will be a proof of concept that the entire sector needs.

As Pinku puts it: “We’re not trying to be the biggest platform in India. We’re trying to be the one that is still standing, and still worth something, twenty years from now.”

That may be the most unfashionable ambition in Indian tech right now. It may also be the most important one.

Interview By: Arushi Agarwal