French carpooling and mobility platform BlaBlaCar is sharpening its focus on India, its largest market, betting on rapid user growth, a more tailored strategy and a gradual shift to a subscription-led model as it aims to begin monetising its expanding user base.
The company plans to scale to as many as 100 million passengers in India in 2-3 years, while investing in local hiring, trust features and product customisation, marking a strategic pivot from its earlier, largely hands-off approach in the country, where long-distance carpooling has been slowly picking up.
“India this year is clearly going to be above 25 million passengers. The country accounts [for] nearly 20% of our userbase,” said Nicolas Brusson, co-founder and chief executive of BlaBlaCar, in an interview with Mint. “Between 25-30% of our carpooling passengers globally are in India.”
The company’s closest competitors in India are sRide and Quick Ride. These two focus primarily on intra-city, on-demand services, while BlaBlaCar’s user base is more focused on long-distance, .
BlaBlaCar has traditionally used a commission-based model in Western Europe, but is now shifting towards a subscription-led approach to monetisation in markets such as India and the 20 new geographies, including Latin America and Southeast Asia, it is entering, Brusson said.
An expanding network of and expressways, rising car ownership and growing willingness to travel short distances for weekend getaways and holidays have helped drive the company’s user base in India.
Passenger vehicle sales grew 7.9% to 4.643 million units in FY26, up from 4.301 million units in FY25, according to data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam). Similarly, the national highway network has expanded from approximately 91,287 km in 2014 to over 1,46,572 km at the end of FY26, according to government data.
BlaBlaCar’s renewed India push—local hiring, dedicated product , and an eventual subscription model—comes as its user base shot up in 2022, without the company having to spend any money on growth. In a previous conversation with TechCrunch last year, Brusson said the company’s user base in 2022 stood at 4.3 million. The platform now has 2 million monthly active users (MAUs) in the country.
MAU is a metric that tracks the number of unique users who engage with a product, platform or app within a 30-day period. It is used to assess an app’s overall usage, retention and popularity.
For the Accel-backed company, this marks its second attempt in India. It began operations in the country in 2015 before shutting down two years later after its services failed to gain traction. However, it kept the platform live
Brusson said the company has already made one hire and expects to recruit more people. “To get to the next level, we need better understanding, more customised marketing, more relationships on the ground. In other markets, we’ve had partnerships to integrate trains and buses in the long-term.”
India priorities
BlaBlaCar has identified two priorities when it comes to localising, or tailoring its operations to the Indian market. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to focus on improving its trust systems.
Currently, the platform uses government IDs to verify users. Brusson said the company plans to add GPS tracking, betting that live location features will increase user engagement.
The other area of focus is to improve the way passengers and drivers connect. “What we’ve managed in France and what we want to do better in India is to make sure that people have a door-to-door experience. The dream is to make it feel like owning a car without a car due to density in the network,” he added.
This is why, alongside its hiring and monetisation plans, the company aims to scale to 50–100 million passengers on the BlaBlaCar platform over the next 2–3 years.
BlaBlaCar’s India users typically travel 100-500km, with an average of 180km. Its most active routes include Bengaluru to Chittoor, Pune to Thane, and Mumbai to Pune. Many of the platform’s users come from tier 2 and tier 3 cities like Pune, Jaipur, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Chittoor, Meerut, and Anantpur. The average price that users pay for a ride stands at ₹430, according to the company.
Path to monetisation
Since entering India in 2015, the company did not monetise its operations, instead allowing its user base to grow organically. Now, with India accounting for the largest share of its carpooling business globally, BlaBlaCar plans to introduce a premium membership starting in 2027.
It follows a different business model from the one it has traditionally used. Previously, the company charged a 20% commission on driver listings, acting as an intermediary. However, in its larger markets, which have shifted from Europe to Brazil, Türkiye and now India, peer-to-peer payments are more common. Peer-to-peer payments refer to transactions where users pay each other directly, without the platform acting as a payment intermediary.
Since the company operates as an intermediary platform connecting drivers and passengers, it does not rely on batch payouts, where earnings are aggregated and distributed to drivers in lump-sum payments. But in peer-to-peer transaction systems, the cost of processing and settling individual payments can become expensive. “You’d spend 3-4% of a ride value to facilitate a transaction, and charging 10-15% commission on top of that leaves a lot on the table for no value to the user,” Brusson said.
As a result, the company is going the freemium way, letting users access its platform for free until they hit a certain amount of rides, after which they’ve to sign up for the membership programme.
But monetisation will continue to be experimental for the next few years, with the company testing price points, premium features and, most importantly, deciding on how many rides users get for free before signing up for a membership. “2027 will be more around exploration. By 2028, we expect to be in the revenue growth phase in India,” said Brusson.
BlaBlaCar began the membership model last year, starting in Brazil, and with digital payments accelerating globally, the plan is to change the business model completely over time.
The company is ramping up its membership model in Mexico and expanding it across other markets in Eastern Europe where it already operates. The company plans to lead with its membership model in its expansion into 20 new countries across Latin America, Southeast Asia, North Africa and Europe.