Today marks the seventh anniversary of our ride-hailing service, Yandex.Taxi. On October 26, 2011, we launched a new service supported by our world-class machine learning and mapping technologies to improve the Moscow taxi market. Since then, Yandex.Taxi has expanded to over a dozen countries, and we recently reached a major milestone for our service.
At exactly 7:48:34 pm Moscow time on September 28, 2018, Yandex.Taxi delivered its 1 billionth ride. During that single second, 43 trips ended simultaneously across 23 cities in 8 different countries, advancing the number of rides past 1 billion.
Over the course of the last seven years, Yandex.Taxi has served 36 million users and more than 900,000 drivers in 14 countries. And we have a driver who has completed 17,728 trips!
Through our commitment to providing a high-quality user experience and enhancing the traditional taxi service with AI, Yandex.Taxi has helped change how millions of people get around. Since launching, our team has continued to integrate new and innovative ways to improve our service for both drivers and riders. One example of this is our enhanced safety features such as a voice and visual driver verification system using Yandex’s speech and computer vision technologies and a “Kids” service that provides booster and car seats.
Among other changes, we have also improved communication between riders and drivers. We have improved our chat feature by integrating Yandex.Translate to reduce language barriers and added notifications to accommodate drivers who are deaf or hard of hearing.
We are thankful to the taxi partners, drivers, and riders who have made reaching 1 billion rides possible. We are also grateful to the people here at Yandex who work to improve the Yandex.Taxi experience for all users.
Looking to the future, we are excited to expand to even more countries and to connect more riders and drivers. Here’s to the next billion rides!