AHMEDABAD: For the clutch of cab-aggregation apps that have grown quickly in the country by offering huge incentives to customers and taxi drivers, a new threat is emerging.Several new startups have launched autorickshaw-hailing services. They are expanding fast as investors see opportunity in the segment and are pumping in money. With India being home to three out of every four autorickshaws in the world and since the threewheeler is a cheaper mode of transport compared with cars, the new entrepreneurs are expecting demand to outpace that for the more established cabhailing services.Ahmedabad’s G-Auto, Indore’s Telerickshaw, Pune’s Autowale, Jaipur’s Chalogekya, Chennai’s Autoraja, Chandigarh’s Jugnoo and Bengaluru’s mGaadi are some of the players in the market. Big operators like Ola and Uber too offer autorickshaw-hailing services, but their focus is mainly on cars. Chandigarh-based Jugnoo, founded in November 2014 by a handful of IITians, recently raised $6 million (Rs 38.4 crore). Jugnoo has presence in five cities and plans to expand to 40 cities and reach one lakh daily transactions in the next one year. “Leveraging smartphones on autorickshaw has added to the growth of auto startups,” said Samar Singla chief executive of Jugnoo.“Taxi-on-call services created a need among the auto drivers to become smarter in terms of technology, quality of service and transparency in terms of fares,” said Apoorv Sharma, founder of Chalogekya.com, a Jaipur-based autorickshaw aggregator. It recently received a seed funding from Rajasthan Angel Investors Network (RAIN). A factor that might have helped the growth in autorickshaw startups is the rise of taxi-on-call services, after which auto drivers readily welcome rickshaw aggregators, said Karanvir Singh, founder of Indore-based Telerickshaw.The two-year-old startup is present in three cities and is planning to expand to 70 more by the end of 2016.According to estimates, there are 50 lakh autos running on Indian roads, catering to five crore people every day. “It’s inevitable. Rickshaw drivers lose business because they are not part of high demand generating organised taxi-on-call network. The only alternative for them is organised auto-on-call culture,” said Anubhav Agrawal, cofounder at AutoRaja.org.AutoRaja has operations in Chennai at present and plans to expand to other places in two phases.Investors like Unitus Seed Fund, RAIN and Snow Leopard are excited about the business. Venture capital chased the taxi market first, and now investors are turning their eyes to this rather untapped market, again looking for the next big thing,” said Chris Kolenaty, founder and CEO of Snow Leopard, the lead investor in Jugnoo.“All modes of transportation in India are evolving quickly, with improved services, interconnections, transparency, and accountability. Due to their mass-reach potential, auto startups will play a pivotal role in the evolution of mass transit in India,” said Will Poole, co-founder and managing partner at Unitus Seed Fund, which is a lead investor in mGaadi.