PickMe is a Sri Lankan taxi hailing and delivery app developed by Digital Mobility Solutions Lanka Ltd. It launched in June 2015. The app is available in English, Sinhala and

Tamil Tamil may refer to: People, culture and language * Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka ** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...

on Android and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

. By 2021 the company had 8000 registered users.

History

PickMe was founded by entrepreneur Jiffry Zulfer in 2015. It was backed by the

International Finance Corporation The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is an international financial institution headquartered in Washington, D.C. and a member of the World Bank Group that offers investment, advisory, and asset-management services to encourage private ...

. In September 2015, PickMe raised 150 million rupees in private funding. By June 2017, 6.5 million rides in total had been completed, with 35,000 rides happening daily, and the number of customers stood at around 620,000.

YAMU acquisition

PickMe acquired YAMU, a food and hotel review site, in July 2019. At the time YAMU had 325,000

monthly active users Active users is a software performance metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular software product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from users or visitors within a relevant range ...

and 615,000 monthly pageviews.

COVID-19 response

During the

COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka The COVID-19 pandemic in Sri Lanka is part of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 () virus. The first case of th ...

, PickMe utilised innovations such as displaying the vaccination status of the driver, providing cash incentives for passengers riding to the nearest vaccination center, contact tracing, and installation of separators and hand sanitization facilities. PickMe's Flash delivery service was used by restaurants to deliver over 8200 orders during the lockdowns.

IPO

The company announced its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

on the Colombo Stock Exchange in September 2024. The company offered 13.04% of its shares and hoped to raise LKR1.5 billion. The IPO was held on 13 September 2024 and was oversubscribed on its opening day itself.

Technology

PickMe's backend services utilise the

microservices In software engineering, a microservice architecture is an architectural pattern that organizes an application into a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services that communicate through lightweight protocols. This pattern is characterize ...

architecture, with over 100 microservices. It utilises

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...

and

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

, is deployed using Docker and

Kubernetes Kubernetes (), also known as K8s is an open-source software, open-source OS-level virtualization, container orchestration (computing), orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Googl ...

, and uses

Apache Kafka Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency pl ...

as a messaging service. The data science platform uses

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. It provides a software framework for distributed storage and processing of big data using the MapReduce programming model. Hadoop wa ...

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californ ...

, and

Apache Hive Apache Hive is a data warehouse software project. It is built on top of Apache Hadoop for providing data query and analysis. Hive gives an SQL-like Interface (computing), interface to query data stored in various databases and file systems that i ...

. PickMe's micoservices are written in Go.

References

External links

* {{All Share Price Index Companies listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange Economy of Colombo Information technology companies of Sri Lanka Taxi companies Transport companies established in 2014