Hive raises $400,000 in seed funding
Hive, a Cairo-based ride-hailing platform for kids has raised $400,000 in seed funding, the startup told MENAbytes today. The investment came from Abdelmoneim Al-Adawy, an early Hive customer who has been using the service for his children since its launch.
Founded last year by Abdelrahman Osama, a UX consultant with 20 years of experience, and Mohamed Aboali, who has built different tech products in his career of over 20 years, Hive connects comes with over 20 years of experience of building different technology products, Hive offers subscription-based safe ride-hailing solutions for kids.
Abdelrahman Osama, the co-founder and CEO of Hive, in a conversation with MENAbytes earlier this year, had explained the process of how their app works.
“Parents download the app, register themselves, and add the school and their home address, and some details about the child(ren). Hive receives the requests and creates a group of four children living nearby going to the same school. Hive’s staff then assigns a captain for this group and arranges a meeting between the captain and parents where all the documents including copies of license, national ID, drug tests, and criminal records are present to the parents. Once accepted, parents pay a small upfront fee and the subscription is activated with the rest of money paid by parents in six monthly installments. The captain takes children to school and brings them back home on a daily basis. The parents can track all the rides on the app.”
The startup uses a distance-based pricing model with different slabs so parents are supposed to pay the fee based on how far they live from the school. And as Abdelrahman had explained parents are required to pay only a portion of fee in advance and the rest in installments instead of paying the lump sum amount in advance which is how most of the transporters and schools charge in Egypt.
The children using Hive (on average) spend a lot less time in their commute than those who use a school bus as the cars on Hive’s network transports only four children at a time (in some rare cases when requested by parents, they transport five children but compensate it with discounts)
