US-based ride sharing platform Lyft Inc has acquired Pune-based startup FinitePaths for an undisclosed amount.
Following the acquisition, FinitePaths founders, Vinay Kakade and Balaji Raghavan, will be joining Lyft. Train Answers, the app developed by the FinitePaths team to answer everyday questions, will be discontinued within the next two weeks.
“We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft, as well as helping grow the Lyft community,†Luc Vincent, vice-president of engineering at Lyft, said in a statement.
Kakade and Raghavan founded FinitePaths in 2015. Trail Answers was a platform where users could ask any questions or answer the questions asked by other users.
Before founding FinitePaths, Kakade had co-created Amazon’s CloudSearch Elasticsearch Service, while Raghavan was with search engine Google as an engineer.
Lyft is America’s second-largest ride-hailing service after Uber, and is expecting self-driving cars to account for a majority of its rides within the next five years. As of August 2016, Lyft was doing 14.6 million rides per month, almost three times the volume it did a year before.
The ride-sharing service provider got into an alliance with automaker General Motors Inc, which invested $500 million in the company last year.
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