If you’re familiar with Gett, you probably know it as a service akin to Uber, enabling users to request rides via black cars on-demand. Pretty soon, however, it wants to be known as a platform for ordering all sorts of “essential” products and services via mobile app.
Founded as GetTaxi in 2010, the company is rebranding as Gett in all markets as it expands into new verticals of on-demand and scheduled services. Today it operates in 32 cities throughout the U.K., Russia, and Israel, as well as New York City in the U.S. Over the coming months, the company plans to enable customers in each of its markets to begin ordering new services beyond its initial car service.
Just as it simplifies the process of ordering a car on mobile, with a flat, non-surge-pricing structure for rides, the company hopes to make it simple to order products or services without having to do a whole lot of searching online. The hope is that it can reduce the friction and time it takes to order sushi or a massage or a plumber.
Beyond transportation, Gett sees an opportunity to capture market share in the food, beauty and wellness, and home maintenance categories. The company plans to launch the first of its new verticals in July, although Gett won’t say which of those services will come first.
Gett certainly won’t be the first company to enable users to order food or to book health and beauty services via mobile app, nor is it the first to attempt to commoditize the home services market. The big advantage Gett has is that it’s built out infrastructure and has users which can be re-used to address those markets.
Using the infrastructure it has built out for urban transportation, Gett plans to unlock new categories of products and services that can be ordered via its mobile apps. Since it already has the underlying technology to connect customers with service providers, route them to the end user, and accept payments, Gett believes it can very quickly turn up new services without having to reinvent the wheel each time.
It also believes it has a critical mass of users to funnel toward those services. According to Gett founder and CEO Shahar Waiser, these new categories will be made available in the same Gett app customers already use to hail black cars.
By choosing select partners in each category, Gett believes it can offer specific services or products of high quality and also reduce the amount of time it takes to receive them.
It might, for instance, choose a specific pizza joint to serve a limited menu for users to choose from. In the same way it can aggregate hair stylists to do in-home or in-office cuts, or handymen to provide simple services around a customer’s house. That might mean a lack of selection, but Gett hopes to offset that in terms of cost and speed of delivery.
The push into other verticals comes as the company was raising $150 million in new cash last summer. Altogether, it’s raised $207 million in funding.