Hailo, the UK rival to Uber, plunges deeper into the red

Daimler to the rescue for loss-making UK taxi-hailing app

Hailo, the taxi hailing app that competes against Uber, plunged even further into the red according to accounts freshly filed at Companies House.

The privately owned company revealed a pre-tax loss of £14.1m in the year to the end of December 2015, up from a loss of £10.3m the year before.

Hailo competes with other aggressive start-ups in the taxi sector, such as Lyft, Gett and, in particular, Uber. However, unlike Uber, which has built-up a large network of its own minicab drivers, Hailo works with existing black cabs.

While sales increased by 37 per cent and 76 per cent in Ireland and Spain, respectively, sales in the UK fell by 12 per cent to £3.37m, presumably as a result of stiff competition from better-known Uber.

As a result of the losses, the company burned through its cash reserves, reducing them from £5.9m to £2.6m - compared to some $100m (£80m) it has raised in total in various rounds of venture funding from the likes of Accel Partners and Union Square Ventures.

The losses effectively forced the company into a merger with MyTaxi, a similar service run by Germany car company Daimler. MyTaxi runs similar taxi hailing services across Europe.

The poor financial results did not prevent its directors from enjoying bumper paydays, with the highest paid director increasing their wage from a mere £250,000 per annum to £338,000 - even though staff numbers were cut from 158 to 132 over the year.

Hailo built its platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has presented how it works in the cloud at recent Computing conferences, including last year's DevOps Summit.

Computing's DevOps Summit returns in March. Places are free to qualifying IT directors and professionals. To reserve a place before they run out, or to peruse the programme at other forthcoming Computing summits, check out Computing's Events 2017 portal.