It was late in the afternoon on the eve of the Mayday celebrations in Finland when the Cabforce acquisition announcement got leaked to the UK press, making it unfortunate timing for the company’s announcement back home. But with Cabforce being one of the lesser known big players in the taxi scene, they’re well due an article.
For those of you catching up on Cabforce, they provide pre-booked taxi rides at a pre-paid rate. The big value driver there is that they’ve plugged into airline booking systems and corporate travel portals like Amadeus and Travelport allowing the business class to have a cab waiting for them at their travel pickups and departures, giving you easy receipts and letting you skip the taxi queue (or try to hail one on the street). While Uber is all the rage these days, there’s clearly more to the ground travel market than just on-demand.
The company has really grown up since we first covered them in 2010 (the company was founded in 2009) Cabforce content is available at over 200 locations in 54 different countries and six continents, and now employs 19 people in its Espoo office.
The Acquisition
Cabforce has been picked up for an undisclosed sum by CarTrawler, aggregator of car rental and ground transportation services that’s backed by BC Partners and Insight Venture Partners, the former of which is a private equity firm that took Amadeus to IPO back in 2010.
According to Cabforce, they evaluated different options for future growth, between growth financing and strategic partner, and decided that an industrial investor would be the best choice. With the acquisition CarTrawler is rebranding Cabforce’s Finnish office as their ‘Centre of Excellence’ to focus on ground transportation, and will be hiring more in Finland.
Cabforce CEO and co-founder Andreas Hansson said in a statement that, “Our partners and suppliers will benefit from this investment through enhancements in technology, data science and conversion capabilities which will strengthen our value proposition significantly. We look forward to continuing to deliver the first-class service that we have built our brand on and that our trade partners have come to expect from Cabforce.”
