Meet the Woman Technopreneur Driving Mexico's Ride-Sharing Evolution Jose Fermoso - Ozy
go to original November 26, 2015

For being one of Mexico’s hottest young technopreneurs, Cristina Palacios comes across as pretty old school. The co-founder of Aventones, a ride-sharing startup that was recently gobbled up by a global giant in the game, Palacios lives with her parents in a home outfitted not with flat-screens and smart systems but with antique furniture and paintings. She’s single and just out of her 20s, but doesn’t go for the Tinder-driven dating scene. “I like love stories,” she says, “and Tinder isn’t conducive to that.”

Fortunately for her investors, Palacios brings plenty of cutting-edge thinking to Aventones — Spanish slang for hitchhiking — one of Latin America’s most successful transit startups. The service, which facilitates intercity car pools for business clients like corporations and universities, now has 80 partnerships in five countries and seen more than $21 million in investment, including from big-time Latin American accelerator NXTP Labs. Earlier this year, Palacios and partners Alberto Padilla and Ignacio Cordero sold Aventones to one of the biggest ride-sharing companies not named Uber or Lyft: France’s BlaBlaCar. Palacios’ success has made her a notable in both tech and conservation in Mexico, and Aventones has joined a growing list of alternative transit hits in the developing world, from Joe Lee’s multibillion-dollar taxi-hailing giant, Didi Kuaidi, in China, to Bangalore, India–based Uber rival Ola.

BlaBlaCar, like Aventones, employs a ride-sharing model different from Uber’s. While the latter competes with the intracity taxi industry, BlaBlaCar takes on intercity transportation such as trains and private cars. With 80 percent of city-to-city travel in Europe done by car, BlaBlaCar has tapped a built-in market there, claiming 20 million users while taking 10 percent of the cost of each ride. As a BlaBlaCar business development lead, Palacios expects to bring her making-green-by-going-green model to potentially millions more users in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, for starters. BlaBlaCar chief operating officer Nicolas Brusson said the Aventones acquisition would help “drive BlaBlaCar’s continued international growth.”

Read the rest at Ozy

Photo: Alex Washburn/OZY

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