Uber Rival 99 Embarks on Massive Brazilian Hiring Spree

Uber Rival 99 Embarks on Massive Brazilian Hiring Spree

Brazil’s unemployment rate is near its record, but at the headquarters of ride-hailing app 99 it’s nowhere in evidence, according to Bloomberg.

The country’s biggest taxi-beckoning tech company is outgrowing its Sao Paulo office after just 17 months as it seeks to quintuple its workforce in 2017 to 1,000 employees. Backed earlier this year by Didi Chuxing and Softbank, 99 is planning to expand into the rest of Latin America in the near future and is on the hunt for more capital since executives were recently in San Francisco digging around.

Even with a hefty competitor in Uber, the company sees no end in sight to the potential. "I can’t even predict how big the market in Brazil will be," said 99’s head of legal, policy and communication Matheus Moraes in an interview at the company’s Sao Paulo headquarters. "We try to forecast, but we just can’t.

The new additions to the staff will help 99 grow in a country with poor infrastructure and a meager public transportation backbone. Traffic in the biggest cities is intolerable, with trips sometimes taking five times longer than they should. For example, it can take three hours to get to the international airport, a 22-mile drive from the financial district.

"Mobility is a problem in Brazil," Moraes said. "In Germany, for example, you don’t need a hailing service, It’s convenient, of course, but not problem solving. Brazil has indeed a problem to solve." The five year-old start-up is in "hyper-growth mode" and snagged the Didi investment in January after reaching out for advice. Softbank’s stake followed within months. Both are minority shareholders and Didi holds a board seat.

Currently, 99 has more than 200,000 drivers in 500 cities, and 14 million users in a country with a population of more than 200 million. That compares to, as of a year ago, Uber’s more than 50,000 drivers and 13 million users in Brazil. Over the past three months, 15 million Brazilians have taken an Uber, yet it still operates in just a fraction of the cities where 99 is present, having doubled in the last year to more than 60.