Tripda shutting down its ridesharing service this week

Rocket Internet-backed company based in Brazil closing a year after its $11 million Series A

Another ridesharing company bites the dust.

Tripda, headquartered in Brazil’s financial center São Paulo, announced today that it is shutting down its long-distance ridesharing platform, a year after the company had secured $11 million in Series A funding from Rocket Internet and other investors.

The service, which in its time had reached over a million travelers across 13 countries (including Brazil and the U.S.), was specifically dedicated to connecting people so they could share long-distance travel costs.

In the U.S., for example, common carpooling destinations included Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco. Other main routes included San Francisco to Napa (wine country) and Los Angeles to Indio (site of Coachella), demonstrating that unlike the short-distance travel most commonly provided by Uber and Lyft, Tripda was targeting a specific group of travelers on leisurely trips.

Here’s a portion of the company’s statement on its closing:

"[D]espite the success of our community, our operating costs became too high, and we had to reassess our prospects. Given the inherent challenge of funding our operation as it continues to grow, we realized it was time to bring our ride to an end, discontinuing the Tripda platform as it is today."

Tripda says its platform will remain open until Friday, March 4th so that existing users can check their booked trips and arrange details with their fellow travelers.

Tripda’s shutdown is just one drop in the sea of consolidation among not just ridesharing companies but the sharing economy as a whole.

On the last day of 2015, Sidecar (one of the earliest competitors for Uber and Lyft) announced that it was shutting down. The company had raised about $35 million from Union Square Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Huron River Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Google Ventures, and Richard Branson—more than triple Tripda’s venture financing—but it wasn’t enough to sustain growth for the company.

Interestingly, if you point your browser to the Brazilian version of Tripda’s website, the company’s farewell message shares a few other “innovative solutions” you can use instead of Tripda, including EasyTaxi, ClickBus, Decaronas, Bynd, Fleety, and Grupo Campinas-SP. But the company lists no such alternatives on the American version of its website.

Tripda was backed by Rocket Internet, a Berlin-based firm we previously covered when it sold off several of its food delivery service startups around the world—including La Nevera Roja in Madrid, PizzaBo in Italy, and hellofood in Italy, Brazil, and Mexico—to London-based Just Eat for €125 million in cash (approximately $139.3 million).

We’ve reached out to the company to see if its founders have any plans for other ventures going forward, and we'll update when we hear back.