Taxify: Optimizing travel in cities of the future

Estonia-based Taxify’s mission is simple: making on-demand rides affordable and accessible to everyone. It all began in 2013 when founder Markus Villig tried to solve people’s frustration with taxis in Estonia. They were expensive, and it took a long time to get a ride. Plus, you have to pay in cash. 

Just 5 years later, Taxify is the fastest growing ride-hailing platform in the world. With over 10 million users and 500,000 drivers in more than 25 countries, it's now expanded to Australia.

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Founder and CEO Markus Villig shared, “The use of bleeding edge technology, including data science and machine learning, has a central role in making transportation more efficient. The engineers at Taxify are solving complex real-time routing issues in some of the world’s most congested cities like Lagos or Nairobi. Bringing that experience to Australia will help to improve traffic and give people back something they value the most: time.

To encourage engineers over the world to spend time on solving problems for future cities, Taxify has launched a machine learning competition. We’re asking contestants to imagine a city in 2022. It's when self-driving car fleets will have become a reality even though drivers will still be playing a crucial role in the industry.”

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“This is a highly multidimensional optimization problem. Getting it right has immediate real-world consequences—riders either get a car in minutes or they will find an alternative. To deliver a reliable service we’re using a variety of methods. These include predicting order locations before they happen, balancing supply and demand with dynamic pricing and developing a smart dispatching engine to maximize global ride completions.

“We believe that integrating on-demand mobility with existing public transportation would save time and money, reduce stress and improve cities through decreased traffic, parking and pollution,” Markus adds.

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