It’s Tuesday, and today we’re covering Rhino, a Brazilian mobility company. Founded by Daniil Sergunin and Alexander Karbankov, the company recently completed a $2.6 million funding round led by TMT Investments and AngelsDeck.

Maybe not to the same degree as Rio de Janeiro, but Sao Paulo has long carried a reputation for being unsafe. In recent years, however, the city has seen steady declines in the most severe forms of violence. In 2023, it recorded a homicide rate of 4.01 per 100,000 inhabitants — lower than New York City.

Where the city still struggles is everyday crime, especially theft and robbery targeting both pedestrians and car drivers. Sao Paulo registered 1,781 robberies and thefts per 100,000 inhabitants, and while cross-city comparisons in this category are less precise, some estimates suggest this rate is roughly twice as high as in London, which itself has been struggling with a wave of similar crimes. Sao Paulo is the epicenter of phone theft in Brazil, accounting for 16% of the national total despite having only about 5% of the country’s population.

This split between a steady decline in lethal violence and the persistence of non-lethal crime is driven by the same underlying factor: the concentration of wealth.

Major global cities tend to be unequal, but there are degrees to this. In Sao Paulo, the top socio-economic groups account for less than 15% of the population, compared to around 40% in cities like New York or Brussels. As a result, the city consistently ranks among the most unequal and segregated major cities in the world. The dissimilarity index places it near the top globally.

The city generates 10% of Brazil’s GDP, accounts for roughly 20% of all millionaires in the country, and older data suggests it once hosted 63% of all foreign companies operating in Brazil. That level of concentration creates opportunities and incentives for crime.

At the same time, a city responsible for 25% of Brazil’s property-tax revenue has the resources to respond. Sao Paulo installed 25,000 surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition, with plans to reach 100,000. The municipality has deployed additional municipal guards in high-traffic areas and introduced an armed guard unit to supplement regular police forces.

But for some, that’s not enough. And some have taken measures into their own hands. And by some I mean quite a lot. Brazil has the highest per-capita number of civilian armored vehicles with handgun protection. In 2022 alone, 25,916 new armored vehicles were registered in the country. Between 2011 and 2022, the share of armored vehicles out of all vehicles rose from 0.24% to 1.32%, a 5.5x increase in 11 years.

As you might expect, a disproportionate number of these vehicles are in Sao Paulo. In total, there are 116,000 armored vehicles in Sao Paulo, roughly a third of the country’s total.

Rhino recognized that even though Brazilians are already the leading adopters of vehicle armoring, there’s still plenty of unmet demand left to serve.

Rhino is a premium ride-hailing service in Sao Paulo that uses only armored vehicles.

There are several parts of the product that are typical for a ride-hailing app, but most of it is not. But let’s, however, start with the former.

The app covers several designated areas in Sao Paulo, and if you’re inside one of them, the flow is basically what you’d expect from any ride-hailing service.

You open the app, choose your destination, wait around 5-7 minutes, get in, and the car takes you where you need to go. If you’re headed outside the service zone, you can also schedule a ride and go as far as 450 km from Sao Paulo. And while the mechanics behind it are different, Uber and others offer scheduled rides too.

That’s pretty much it. Everything else is atypical.

Let’s start with the obvious — the armored bit.

Seeing the demand and drawing on their own experience of feeling unsafe, the founders launched the service in 2024 promising a safer ride. Rhino’s vehicles are level III-A-armored, meaning they can withstand handgun fire.

But while the armor is the most eye-catching feature, it’s not the only thing that makes Rhino stand out. At the end of the day, armoring alone increases safety, but it doesn’t automatically make the experience feel high-end. What creates that is everything around it, including things like:

From the user’s perspective, Uber standardized the process of finding a ride and getting to your destination. Rhino standardized how you get there, i.e. the actual experience during the ride. And did it in a way that feels like an upgrade rather than a constraint.

Even though the company is under two years old, it’s already moved into B2B. Again, this isn’t groundbreaking as a concept — it works similarly to traditional B2B ride-hailing offerings: consolidated billing for HR, monthly reporting, airport transfers, and so on.

For clients, the core value is also familiar: no fixed costs, no fleet to manage, no idle cars, no driver contracts. With Rhino, the value proposition becomes even clearer, because owning and maintaining armored vehicles is a much bigger operational and financial burden than running a normal fleet.

Right now, B2B accounts for about 10% of the business, but the company expects it to reach 20% next year.

My loyal readers might remember that I’ve written about Rhino before. It’s actually the first company I’m covering for the second time, simply because I felt it deserved a proper article.

The point being, in my article I compared it to Uber, but with a twist.

Well, that was wrong. And the reason it was wrong is that, while the monetization is similar, the underlying business model is counter-positioned against Uber in three ways: fleet, drivers, and pricing.

To summarize: Rhino operates its own fleet, treats drivers more like traditional employees, and charges more than typical ride-hailing services.

The monetization is the simplest part of the whole business: they earn money through per-ride fares.

Rhino’s rise has been rapid. From 15,000 people on the waiting list in late 2023, to 170,000 registered users in early 2025, to 200,000 in mid-2025, and 300,000 by November 2025. We don’t know revenue, but company projections put it at almost $10 million.

While this model gives Rhino tighter control over the service, it also removes the network effect benefits and near-zero marginal costs of a marketplace, and replaces them with a capital-intensive structure, putting the pressure on the balance sheet. There are still scale benefits: the more customers Rhino serves, the more they can improve utilization. But the market is relatively limited, so those benefits might not be that large. Even if the economics work in Sao Paulo, I’m not convinced there’s a large pool of untapped demand.

Then there’s expansion. Similar safety concerns exist in other large Latin American cities, but the model requires a concentrated geographic demand profile to work well. Customers need to be clustered in relatively tight zones so that a small number of cars can serve a large number of rides. If the wealth geography of a city is more spread out or structured differently, utilization risks go up.

And finally, long-term, we’d all prefer to live in cities where no one needs an armored vehicle in the first place.

While the B2C side seems less scalable and harder to optimize, the B2B offering is better positioned. Demand from corporate clients is predictable, which makes utilization predictable. The geography problem also becomes more manageable because you can shape the service around where specific companies are located. Routes are more standardized, which in turn improves utilization. And, as I mentioned earlier, the economics for B2B clients are even stronger compared to traditional ride-hailing. I feel like this segment is more scalable not only in Brazil, but across the broader region.

When you look at Rhino, there’s a real opportunity to build a moat in B2B based on operational excellence: driver selection, fleet management, and strict service standards.

On a separate note, I keep wondering if there’s a market for this model when the job-to-be-done isn’t safety at all, but simply looking cool. That would open up a much wider global market.

There’s almost no such thing as a market that’s “too small.” Who would’ve imagined you could build a ride-hailing app with armored vehicles in Brazil? Yet here we are. So the real question isn’t whether the market is big enough, it’s whether a company can deliver a valuable solution and execute well. If the problem is painful enough and the execution is solid, you can build a real business on top of it.