Meet 25- year-old Taxify’s Founder who is smashing Uber’s monopoly in Europe and Africa

Not many people want to take on Uber, but Markus Villig launched his own competitor, Taxify (now known as Bolt), when he was only 19-years-old. While his initial vision was to focus on taxis in Tallinn, Estonia, the founder and CEO has grown Taxify rapidly in the last 7 years.

The service now has over five million customers and over 100,000 drivers. Taxify also expanded to across 40 cities in 25 European and African countries, from Lagos to Australia, Uber, for comparison, is in 80 countries.

Annoyed at the high prices and outdated tech of taxi services in his home city of Tallinn, Markus Villig founded Taxify with a loan from his parents when he was 19. He personally persuaded the first 50 drivers to sign up to his platform, and then teamed up with his brother Martin and co-founder Oliver Leisalu to start growing the startup.

Villig, who has been name-checked in Forbes Europe’s “30 under 30” tech list, said that one thing Taxify does differently to Uber is offer “significantly better” earnings for drivers. Whereas competitors often charge drivers a commission of up to 30%, Taxify only takes 15%, he said.

Taxify has already attracted big investments from global car and taxi giants. In 2017, China’s Didi Chuxing invested an undisclosed sum in the young company. Its latest investment round in May—led by Daimler—raised $175 million, bringing Taxify’s valuation to $1 billion, and making it a rare European “unicorn.”

Showing that a young European startup can rival the might of Uber was a victory in itself. Villeg said: “Personally for me it’s pretty upsetting that when you’re a young person in tech growing up, and every single big company is from Silicon Valley, and Europe doesn’t have a single company that’s in the same ballpark.”

Taxify has surged to 500 staff in just five years (not including drivers). Villig says he’s not about to pen a management book about his secret sauce for success just yet, but he revealed one thing he wishes he’d known five years ago:

“I don’t think I realized at first how uncompromising you should be in bringing the best people on board,” he said. “They’ll pull the company forward, instead of being the ones that need to be pulled… For example, our product team is just 50 people, but having extremely talented engineers means we’re able to compete with huge companies, with teams of thousands of people.”