The application integrates both taxi and ridesharing services and it can be accessed in 100 cities from ten European countries (Germany, UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Austria, Romania and Sweden) provided the user creates an account on their mobile phone.
Free Now and Clever will continue to operate in parallel for a while, as Clever drivers are in process of transiting to the new application. The FREE NOW application will also be launched in other cities in Romania in the coming period.
“Romania is one of the leading markets, on a group level, in terms of taxi rides and alternative transportation”, says Andrei Frunza, CEO Clever / FREE NOW. “Despite not being available for placing orders, in Romania, so far, foreign passengers already using the FREE NOW application attempted to order almost 500,000 rides, through the application, in 2018 alone, when they visited Romania”.
Free Now was established under the name of mytaxi, in June 2009, and it was the world’s first taxi application to establish a direct connection between passengers and taxi drivers. FREE NOW has been part of a joint venture between BMW and Daimler, since February 2019, and currently has over 700 employees who work in 26 offices worldwide.
Clever was established in 2010 and is the first e-hailing application in Romania. The company has over 70 employees and it is present in 20 towns and cities in Romania. In June 2017, Clever jointed the FREE Now Group.