It’s Tuesday, and today we’re talking about Fery Rides, an Indian mobility business. Founded by Ajay Kumar, Vindhya Mehrotra, and Himanshu Chaubey, the company recently raised ~$250,000 from IAN Angel Fund.

For the second week in a row I’m writing about a mobility startup. For the second week in a row the startup is tackling a safety problem.

But this is where the similarities stop. As always, let’s start with why we’re here, in India.

Our story today breaks down into three parts: the problem, the growing openness to solutions like Fery Rides, and the “why now.”

India reported 448,211 crimes against women in 2023, and that number has been rising. But the bigger issue is underreporting. Many cases never reach police records or are not classified as crimes at all.

Harassment is a clear example of this gap. Nationwide, 56% of women say they’ve experienced harassment on public transport. In Delhi. our focus today, 73% report the same. If you include women who preferred not to answer, that number reaches 85%. And 92% of incidents occur while traveling: waiting at the station, inside the bus or train, or walking to or from it.

The consequences vary, but the core one is psychological harm, which then shows up as changes in behaviour and everyday adaptations.

Let’s start with the fact that even without major life changes or missed opportunities, there are still compromises. 92% of women said they avoid travelling after dark, and 62% prefer to travel in a group.

And then there are far more significant adjustments people make to feel safer.

One such change is the choice of transport. A study in Delhi found that women’s average trip length is 37.5% shorter than men’s, yet men spend about 35% less. The gap comes from women choosing what they consider safer options and paying more for that safety: 29% said they switched to a more expensive route because it felt safer, and 41% stopped or reduced their use of public transport.

Another shift is the opportunity cost — the choices that never happen. An ORF study showed that half of women avoidedpursuing education or work because of safety concerns.

None of this reflects a society moving forward, economically or socially.

Both national and regional governments have acknowledged that, having introduced a wide range of measures to mitigate the harassment issue.

In 2010 Delhi Metro introduced women-only coaches, which is good. The problem, however, is that men still ride in those coaches, and it’s not actually coaches, it’s coach, singular. Say an average train has six coaches, which means that for every woman to be able to ride in a women-only coach no more than 16.6% of all passengers should be women. Still, that’s better than nothing.

Delhi’s government didn’t stop at that, though. In 2019 all bus travel became free for women, with the city now moving towards an Aadhar-based Pink Card allowing for free lifetime bus travel.

On a national level, a 2020 OSHWC Code requires employers to provide safe and reliable transportation to women working night shifts. These measures don’t solve the problem completely, and I doubt they will. What they do, however, is legitimize women-only solutions in society.

Women are becoming more entrenched in India’s economy. Labour participation is slowly growing: from 27.8% in 2019 to 31.7% in 2024. Delhi has also seen a slight increase from 11.2% in 2018 to 14.5% in 2024.

Women get more access to technology, with 75% having access to mobile phones and driving the majority of the growing internet user base.

There’s been a 32% increase in female enrollment in higher education between 2015 and 2022, and today women constitute half of all the students.

Financial account ownership has skyrocketed from 26.5% in 2011 to 89.2% in 2024. In 2011 account ownership among men was 60% higher, today it’s equal.

There’s improvement in opportunity access and equality on many fronts. Now all that is needed is to allow women to access those opportunities in a safe manner.

Fery Rides is a women-only ride-hailing service currently operating in Gurugram, with plans to expand across Delhi NCR. The core job of the product is simple: give women safe, affordable rides. To do that, the service is built around two main elements:

The scooter side matters for pricing and emissions, but it isn’t unique.

The safety part is, so we’ll focus on that.

While the main proposition is built around women drivers, Fery also offers other safety features like real-time tracking, an SOS alert, and customer support through WhatsApp.

There are also safety-adjacent features that don’t directly increase safety but do reduce stress for riders: a flat pricing structure without surge, a zero-cancellation promise, and a more lenient waiting policy. For the latter, the first 10 minutes are free; after that, up to 30 minutes, every 5-minute block costs about $0.10. It feels very customer-friendly.

Finally, Fery Rides has crafted its positioning carefully. The pink colour scheme, the light visual style, the language that reinforces calm and reliability, and the framing of drivers as “Sister Partners” all push toward the same goal: creating emotional trust and building loyalty on both the rider and driver side.

Fery provides three types of rides. Two are standard for the industry: scheduled rides and on-demand rides.

Scheduled rides are aimed at professionals and work exactly as expected: a customer plans a route, sees the price, and books it if everything looks good. They are the company’s main focus

On-demand rides are meant to work the same way they do on other ride-hailing apps, but they’re not the company’s main offering yet. For now, on-demand rides are only available during certain hours on specific routes. I’ll get into the reasons in the next section, but building a women-only ride-hailing operation in a city that isn’t the country’s largest is not straightforward.

And then there are rental rides. Here, a customer can rent an electric scooter on a per-hour basis and ride themselves without a driver.

“Why won’t Uber do this?” is the basic question any investor would ask a ride-hailing company.

And the core proposition — women-only drivers — is something Uber and other operators can do and, in some cases, already do. Uber actually launched pilots in the U.S. with women-only drivers. Most rides on Uber are on-demand, so if no woman driver is available the customer might have to switch to a male driver, but scheduled rides still exist. So on that specific feature, Fery Rides doesn’t have a clear differentiation.

Where differentiation does show up is in everything else, which can be grouped into three buckets:

Fery is now starting to layer new products on top of its core offering. There’s Fery for Business, which combines women-only drivers with account management and simplified billing. And is starting to expand beyond scooters and local rides, adding cars as well. For now, it has partnered with Sakha Cabs to offer airport rides with women drivers.

This part isn’t as clear. Fery doesn’t take a commission on rides. But they do provide the scooters to drivers. How the scooter-related charges are split between partners and Fery Rides isn’t clear. The company also earns additional revenue from renting out its fleet to customers.

Since launching in 2023, the company has completed 65,000 rides and onboarded 250 drivers. Repeat ridership sits at 70%.

The model requires quite a bit of capital. It took years for Uber to scale profitably. In Fery’s case, aside from the costs that Uber incurred, there’s also driver training, which adds both capital and operational challenges. But I don’t think that’s the biggest issue. A larger challenge to me is that Fery Rides has painted itself into a corner on several fronts, which makes scaling harder:

And then there’s the pure scale of competitors like Ola and Uber. Their breadth can easily overpower the “purity” of Fery’s offering.

There’s a real problem to solve, and the addressable market is growing. As more women join the workforce and become more mobile, the negative externalities of that progress get more pronounced. On top of that you have a business with a singular focus — one that isn’t trying to serve every segment the way traditional ride-hailers do.

While I don’t think this becomes a huge business, I do think it can create a niche for itself by sticking to its mission and slowly expanding beyond Gurugram and eventually beyond the Delhi area.

If repeat ridership holds up as the company scales, Fery can become the default player in this niche. Price and availability are difficult to build, but also not that defensible. That’s why Uber has competition everywhere.

Safety, however, is different. I don’t think there’s room for three companies all positioning themselves as the “safe mobility solution for women.” The supply and demand aren’t there, and the branding would dilute quickly.

If Fery Rides becomes the player in that space, then it’ll be in a very solid position.

Writing about safety for the second week in a row got me thinking. Most companies try to turn something bad into something good. Which is quite sad if you think about it. Because you can also turn something good into something better, but that’s rarer. There are so many companies trying to change the world for the better, but there are still so many things that have to be changed.