taxi.rip · investor brief
Investor brief · Pre-seed · Tampa · Launching Jan 2027
taxi.rip
Here lies the old meter
Uber, but fair. Same route, same price, every day. The driver keeps 70 percent, guaranteed , plus every cent of tips. No surge. Ever.
A $15 ride on Uber today rider pays $15
platform keeps ~$9
driver ~$6
Uber and Lyft keep about 40 percent on average, up to 70 on some rides.
The same $15 ride, on taxi.rip rider pays $15
A fixed 70 / 30 split that never moves. Insurance is a printed line inside our 30.
01 The problem
Both sides are getting squeezed.
Our founder has taken rideshare to work almost every day for four years in Tampa. No car. Five hundred plus drivers. They all say the same thing.
"On a fifty dollar ride I see maybe twenty."THE MOST REPEATED LINE IN 500+ RIDES
~40%
The average cut Uber and Lyft now take, up from the low 20s a few years ago.
$10–18
What a driver really earns per hour after gas, wear and taxes.
60%
Of riders say they cut back this year because prices got too high.
$2.99
Monthly fee Uber now charges riders just to freeze one price on one route.
The same morning commute costs $8 one day and $22 the next. The rider feels robbed. The driver feels robbed. Neither has anywhere else to go.
A two sided market where both sides are unhappy is not a stable market.
02 The solution
Three promises. Printed on every receipt.
01 One price, every day
A to B costs the same on a Tuesday morning and a Friday night. Prices come from distance and time, not from an auction on how badly you need a ride. Holidays and major events are published in advance, and drivers get every extra dollar.
02 A fixed 70 / 30 split
The driver keeps 70 percent, always. Not "up to." The rider's receipt and the driver's receipt are the same page, and our insurance cost is a line on it.
03 Tips are untouchable
One hundred percent to the driver. We never take a cent of a tip, on any ride, ever.
Drivers bring their own car, pass a background check, and stay free to drive on other apps. We are just the honest meter in the middle.
03 How it works
The receipt is the product.
Everything above is abstract until you see one ride. This is what both sides see, on the same page, for the same trip:
TAXI.RIP · RIDE RECEIPT · TAMPA
USF → Downtown, 8.9 mi $15.00
Surge $0.00
Driver earns (70%) $10.50
Insurance $1.35
Payments, tech, support $3.15
Tip (100% to driver) $3.00
Driver takes home $13.50
Today that same ride pays the driver about $5 to $7 before costs. Here they take home roughly double, and the rider paid exactly what they expected when they woke up.
04 The economics
We profit on ride one. No subsidies, ever.
On a $15 ride we keep $4.50. After insurance and processing, about $1.60 is real margin . Multiply by volume. We never pay to buy rides, which is the mistake that sank everyone before us.
Why 30 percent and not less
We modeled every split against real Florida costs, including a worst case insurance scenario. A 25 percent cut only breaks even and cannot fund a team. Thirty stays profitable even in the worst case and still leaves the driver with 70. It is the lowest fair number that actually works.
How we afford $1M coverage from zero
Florida law requires the platform to carry $1 million on every trip. That scares people. It should not, because of how the coverage is actually bought:
NOT A FLEET
We do not insure cars we do not own. Specialist carriers such as Buckle and Mobilitas write rideshare coverage billed by the mile driven .
SCALES UP
Ten rides in week one costs ten rides of insurance. It grows only as rides happen , so it behaves like a cost per ride, not a bill up front.
THE UPFRONT
The only real upfront cost is a deposit and minimum premium, roughly $100k to $150k . That is the single biggest thing this raise pays for.
Starting small is the cheap version. We launch on a few dense Tampa corridors with about 100 vetted drivers. Short, well lit, low speed city miles are the cheapest to insure, and a small capped pilot is exactly what an insurer needs to write a first quote.
05 Proof it works
Fair splits already win everywhere but the US.
This is not a theory. In Europe and India, lower take, driver first apps are beating the giants right now.
Company Where What happened Rapido India Near zero commission. Now more monthly users than Uber and Ola there combined. Uber's CEO calls it his toughest rival. Bolt Europe 15 to 25 percent cut. Took a quarter of the European market and turned its first profit in 2025. Namma Yatri India Zero commission, flat daily fee. Signed up half a city's drivers and forced Uber and Ola to copy it. inDrive 48 countries Price transparency as the product. The world's second most downloaded ride app.
Others tried it in the US and each died from one mistake: Juno burned cash on subsidies, Empower is fighting regulators for skipping the rules. We do neither. We stay lean and we comply loudly.
Nobody has put it all together
taxi.rip Uber Lyft Driver keeps 70% fixed ~60% varies ~60% varies Same price every day YES NO NO Split shown on receipt YES NO NO Follows state law YES YES YES Charges to avoid surge NO SURGE $2.99/mo PRICE LOCK Bookable by AI assistants DAY ONE NO NO
06 Why now
Uber got profitable by making it worse.
For a decade Uber and Lyft lost billions buying the market with cheap rides. Any competitor would have been subsidized to death. That era is over. They turned their first real profits in 2023 and 2024 by doing three things:
Raising prices across the board once the price war ended.Raising their cut from the low 20s to around 40 percent. That gap is the profit.Cutting the side bets and adding surge fees and ads on top.
Wall Street will not let them lower prices again. That is the opening, and it did not exist five years ago.
The second thing that changed is cost. Every fair rideshare before us needed hundreds of staff for support, dispatch and onboarding. We run those with AI and a team of three. The fair model finally fits inside a 30 percent margin.
07 Where we start
Tampa first. We live here and ride here every day.
3.3M
Tampa Bay metro, one of the fastest growing large metros in the country.
50k+
Students at USF alone. Dense, loyal, price sensitive riders we already know how to reach.
1 law
Florida sets one statewide rulebook. No city by city permits to fight.
Our founder is personally known to hundreds of Tampa drivers. We start on the USF, downtown and airport corridors, prove the model, then repeat the exact playbook in Orlando, St. Pete and Gainesville. Delivery and larger vehicles come only after rides are profitable.
08 The ask
We are raising $500,000 for a full year to launch Tampa.
A 12 month runway that pays a full time founding team, insures the platform, and puts verified drivers on the road for a public launch in January 2027 . The product is already built in house.
Founding team salaries · CEO, CTO, CMO ($75k each) $225,000
Insurance deposit & minimum premium $110,000
Tampa launch marketing (USF + drivers) $60,000
Support staff · driver & rider ops $40,000
Driver onboarding & background checks $25,000
AI tools & infrastructure $20,000
Licensing, legal & compliance $20,000
Total raise $500,000
Founder salaries are set modestly below market. Three people plus support, kept small on purpose because AI runs the support, dispatch and onboarding that used to need dozens.
The 12 months
NOW–DEC 26
Incorporate, secure the state license, bind the first insurance quote , recruit and vet launch drivers, harden the app.
JAN 2027
Public launch in Tampa on the USF, downtown and airport corridors.
THRU 2027
Prove 70 / 30 works at a profit, hit driver and ride targets, prepare the next Florida cities.
We are also looking for a growth co-founder to own distribution, and a first insurer partner. If this works in one city, the same playbook scales across the country.
Muhammad Kamil · Founder · muhammadkamilali@gmail.com · Tampa, FL
09 Questions we get asked
The hard questions, answered up front.
What stops Uber from simply copying this?
Their shareholders do. Uber became profitable by expanding its take rate, and the market now prices the stock on that expansion continuing. Cutting from roughly 40 percent to 30 across millions of rides would cost billions in market value and force them to admit publicly what the difference was. They can discount one city for one quarter to hurt us. They cannot make our promise permanent, because permanence is exactly what their earnings will not allow.
What if the first insurance quote comes back far higher than you modeled?
We modeled it at three levels, including a worst case roughly double the national average, and 30 percent still clears a profit per ride in all three. If a quote lands beyond even that, we have three levers before touching the driver split: launch on fewer, lower risk corridors and hours, raise the flat price modestly while still never surging, or delay launch until a second carrier bids. The deposit line in this raise is sized against the stress case, not the base case.
Why would drivers actually switch?
They already do this everywhere else. Rapido and Namma Yatri took huge driver share in India in under two years on exactly this promise, and Empower did it in Washington DC. Drivers keep multiple apps open by default, so trying us costs them nothing and switching is not a decision they have to make once. Our founder personally knows hundreds of Tampa drivers, which is how the first hundred get recruited without paid acquisition.
Why would riders switch, if the price is the same?
Because the price is not the same on the rides that hurt. A commuter takes the same trip eight to ten times a week and gets a different price nearly every time. We win on certainty, and on the surge nights when Uber costs double. We also start where switching is easiest: a dense campus where riders talk to each other constantly and price sensitivity is highest.
Why Tampa and not a larger market?
Florida preempts local rideshare rules, so one state license covers every city we want next, with no city by city permit fights. Tampa Bay is 3.3 million people with USF's 50,000 students inside it, our founder lives here with four years of driver relationships, and short city miles are the cheapest kind to insure. It is the cheapest place in the country for us to prove the model and the easiest to expand from.
What does $500,000 actually prove?
Three things that unlock a seed round: a bound insurance policy at a known price per ride, a live and fully compliant marketplace, and real unit economics from real rides rather than a model. The single most valuable output of this raise is turning our insurance estimate into a signed number.
Isn't a lower take rate just a race to the bottom?
We are not competing on price, we are competing on predictability. The take rate is fixed and public, which turns it into a promise rather than a lever. Our published plan moves it to 72 / 28 as scale earns better insurance pricing, so the improvement goes to drivers. A race to the bottom is what happens when the number is secret and moves every quarter, which is the market we are entering.