Taxify rebrands as Bolt to expand its transport options beyond private cars

It’s not clear whether Hopp will also now rebrand as Bolt, or how it will get used, but at the moment I’m seeing Hopp branding across several areas of the new Bolt site.While London — and other tense markets for ridesharing startups like Spain and Germany — have all remained elusive, Bolt has used its home base of Estonia to edge into a number of other territories where rules have been less stringent and competition less fierce, including “most of the Central and Eastern European markets.” Sweden is the next country on its launch list, he added.To the ordinary passenger or driver, Bolt might look a lot like many other ride-hailing apps you might know such as Uber, but behind the scenes, the two have taken very different tracks when it comes to launching and growing services.While Uber has pursued a strategy of global domination and (over the years) spending and launching aggressively to gain first-mover advantage in a number of markets, Bolt has done nearly the opposite. Villig believes that being a later entrant has also meant that Bolt has spent significantly less to educate the market and pick up new customers and drivers for its own private ride-hailing services.And when it comes to R&D, the company is investing in this — but it’s mainly coming in the form of hiring engineers to improve and expand its mapping and routing instructions for drivers and passengers that have a choice of using multiple services, rather than more costly efforts in areas like self-driving cars.