A broken nose put Arsen Tomsky on the path to success. It was New Year’s Eve on the cusp of 1997 when the future inDrive CEO was setting off to meet some friends outside his hometown of Yakutsk, the world’s coldest city in northeastern Siberia. He was lucky enough to hail a taxi only for three guys to push in front and claim it for themselves. “We started to fight,” Tomsky, 51, recalls with a chuckle. “They heavily beat me, broke my nose, and tore my jacket.”
Admitting defeat, Tomsky returned home, patched himself up, and instead went to another friend’s party closer to home. That Tomsky so easily shrugged off the incident speaks less to his personal bravado—“I’m a typical tech nerd,” he laughs—as to just how fraught the issue of public transport was in Yakutsk, where taxi cartels would exploit the -60°C (-76°F) winter chill to hike prices, regularly sparking fistfights.
Still, the incident planted a seed that soon became an obsession for Tomsky, whose upbringing had been defined by injustice. Why had he grown up in a house blighted by domestic violence? Why had he been afflicted with a severe stutter that schoolyard bullies had targeted so mercilessly? Why had he been born in this frigid city less than 300 miles from the arctic circle with few opportunities for a budding entrepreneur? Why did simply hailing a cab risk serious injury?
“Since the first day, it was a story of fighting injustice,” he says. “That is what really motivates me, because in my life, I had a lot of injustices.”
Of course, Tomsky was not alone in his indignation. And when, in the winter of 2012, Yakutsk’s taxi drivers hiked their prices by 50%, a group of students started an online message board where people could post journey requests, car owners could respond with offers of transport, and both parties could mutually agree on fares. Before long, some 50,000 people out of an urban population of 280,000 were using the blog. “It was an absolute social phenomenon,” says Tomsky.
For Tomsky, who already ran Yakutsk’s top digital media firm, Sinet Group, the potential was obvious, and so he contacted the student organizers with a business proposal. inDrive, which initially stood for “Independent Drivers,” was born a year later, broadly following the same principles.
In contrast to ride-hailing apps such as Uber, DiDi, and Grab, inDrive doesn’t automatically match passengers and drivers. Instead, passengers input their origin and destination, and drivers bid for the fare. Passengers can then select from willing drivers based on various criteria: price, distance, star rating, and car model. It means humans dictate prices rather than algorithms, and both drivers and passengers have more freedom to choose their fares and rides.
Drivers for mainstream ride-hailing apps typically cannot see the destination nor the fare for their next booking. And if they refuse a ride, they get deprioritized or even banned from future work. So the freedom to bid and choose customers, combined with lower commissions compared with established firms—starting at 0% before gradually increasing to around 10%—has made inDrive especially popular with drivers, which, in turn, means greater choice for passengers.
From its far-flung, humble beginnings, inDrive has now spread to 888 cities spanning 48 countries, including Miami in the U.S., and boasts 3,000 staff across 24 international offices. With over 200 million downloads, it’s the world’s second-most popular mobility app after Uber. Following a $150 million investment round in 2021, the company achieved unicorn status, valued at $1.23 billion. Since then, revenue has grown six-fold and inDrive is now EBITDA positive. In 2025, “we will become net profitable,” says Tomsky.
Though Tomksy has more in his sights beyond simply balancing his books. He’s concerned by the high level of influence that companies like Meta, X, Facebook, and OpenAI—whose CEOs have collectively been dubbed the “broligarchy” since their front-row attendance at President Donald Trump’s Inauguration—have on human civilization today and wants to forge a new paradigm of enterprise. “If those technology companies’ main focus is making revenues, it may not be safe,” he says. “It could be really dangerous.”
Tomsky insists inDrive is not a social enterprise, saying that he may well IPO one day, though he deems it a “very exciting experiment” to build a “large, very successful company on a less materialistic idea.” If successful, “I believe many other entrepreneurs, companies, will repeat it,” he says. “And if some of them achieve success, we have a good chance to invent a new kind of tech entrepreneurship that changes the trajectory of modern capitalism. This is my goal.”
It’s a bold gambit for a firm that most Americans have never even heard of. Though that anonymity is partly by design. inDrive’s international expansion was deliberately targeted at underserved markets across Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, focusing on smaller cities such as Astana in Kazakhstan, Arusha in Tanzania, and, with a dash of irony, Uberlândia in Brazil. “When we choose where we should go, the main criteria is if there is injustice,” he says.
Industry experts say this was a smart move. As ridesharing is overwhelmingly local, it is a relatively simple business to break into; all you need is to recruit a couple hundred drivers in any locale where passengers are dissatisfied with current offerings. Compare this with a short-term property-sharing business like Airbnb, whose competitors must almost go global straight off the bat.
Even then, had inDrive dived straight in at prominent cities, the big players could likely have just dropped their prices and crowded them out. But by focusing on specific, underserved markets, Tomsky managed to stealthily grow inDrive without spooking the established competitors.
“They played around the edges,” says Jeffrey Towson, a private-equity investor and business consultant. “If they had come into Silicon Valley and dropped their prices on day one, the existing players would have matched them and made it very difficult.”
When Tomsky did venture into the big smoke, it wasn’t a great success. In 2018, inDrive launched a pilot in New York City though shut it down after just a few months given a deluge of fraudulent credit card transactions. It was a learning experience for Tomsky, who chose Miami for his next American venture in 2023, owing to cultural crossover with Latin America, where inDrive was already very successful. Miami “is not a big city for us, but it’s profitable,” says Tomsky. “We can test new features and innovation. But we don’t plan to expand in the U.S. for now, because it’s a very expensive market.”
Not to mention a nation currently engaged in a new Cold War against Tomsky’s homeland. Indeed, how does a company vowing to fight injustice operate in Russia following Vladimir Putin’s senseless February 2022 invasion of Ukraine? Well, it can’t and it doesn’t.
In response to Europe’s first full-scale war since World War II, inDrive shuttered its Russian operations and divested itself of its local business. More than 1,000 employees based in Yakutsk and Moscow were offered the chance to relocate to offices in either Cyprus or Kazakhstan. Tomsky even adopted the latter’s citizenship after renouncing his Russian citizenship.
“Before this, I thought that we could in small steps change life in Russia, despite the fact it’s a very corrupt state,” he says. “But when this war began, it was a really big shock. I couldn’t believe it and we immediately decided to leave. And I made some antiwar declarations and now it’s not safe for me to go to my hometown. It is super sad.”
Aside from his personal estrangement, it pains Tomsky to know that the conflict and sanctions it spurred mean it’s now virtually impossible for another global success story like inDrive to sprout from his homeland. Tomsky’s other media operations were also forced to close in 2022.
“Now it’s absolutely impossible to run really independent media in Russia,” he shrugs. “And it’s a huge brain drain from the country. Also, it changed people’s values, and the entire national idea is very aggressive. I hope it will change because Russia is a beautiful country with very talented people. It’s not good for Russia at all and, of course, we hope for peace.”
In an age of tech moguls unashamedly pandering to authoritarian leaders, Tomsky’s position is refreshing. Though he says it’s also good business. The benefits of fighting injustice as a “super mission,” as he puts it, are three-fold: Firstly, it fosters a more emotional relationship with users. Second, it establishes better ties with local governments, media, influencers, and so on. Third, it really motivates your team.
“When you do such things, you get oxytocin, the happiness hormone, and people start to feel happier,” he says. “The main goal in life is to be happy, so I used it, and it really motivates me too. Because I don’t want to work just for revenue. I started my career as a software engineer, and all my life I didn’t care about money. The most expensive thing I possess is my MacBook.”
It’s a tactic that appears to be working for inDrive, which has diversified beyond mobility to include financial services with inDrive Money, and other urban services, such as housekeeping and home repairs. In late December, it also entered the grocery business in Pakistan.
Still, experts are divided on whether inDrive’s business model, albeit popular, is truly as revolutionary as Tomsky would like to think. After all, the cost structures are basically the same as Uber; you’ve still got a driver paying for a car, gas, and insurance. It’s hard to know how much inDrive’s success is from the canny targeting of underserved markets, or the simple fact that their commissions are lower, rather than tearing down the shibboleths of profit-centered capitalism.
“What’s the real business model here? And is it really a gamechanger? It’s not clear to me,” says Towson. “I like it, but I’m not sure it really changes the numbers at all.”
Tomsky is happy to let his customers answer for him, though he’s also putting his money where his mouth is. He plans to funnel nearly all his personal wealth into non-profit initiatives, he says, with nine already under way, including a university in Kazakhstan and an IT training initiative across Africa. One initiative particularly close to Tomsky’s heart is Ayta.AI, which helps people with stutters sound natural on video calls. A frequent technique for stutterers to break out of a verbal stall is to try whispering or singing their words, though many feel self-conscious doing so in professional settings. Ayta.AI’s software recognizes when these techniques are being employed and changes their language to sound like regular speech.
“Our next step is probably to make some portable device so people with stutters can [use the assistive technology when they] go to buy coffee,” he says. “I also want to establish some scientific research center and hope we will find some solution to eliminate stutters entirely.”
It’s a way of harnessing AI to augment the human experience, for which Tomsky is a cautious champion. He feels that it marks “the beginning of moving people to some new digital universe,” he says. “In the next 100 years, we will move to it step by step. Because now we are creatures in the body of monkeys, and we don’t live so long. To fully realize the potential of soul and mind, some people will go to this digital universe and AI will help accelerate and orchestrate that. But of course, there are some obvious risks and threats, and this area should be regulated.”
It’s an existential debate that Tomsky never imagined would sprout from nursing cuts and bruises at a New Year’s party in Yakusk—one he never even wanted to attend. But if his life has taken a wild detour from that point, his future business success isn’t the only reason the evening sticks out in his mind. “That night I met my future wife,” he laughs.
“She was intrigued by my face bandages,” he supposes, “and I was the one boy who was sober that night!” Or perhaps it was the glint of inspiration in his eye.
The post ‘Fighting Injustice Is My Business Model’: inDrive CEO Arsen Tomsky on His Mission to Redefine Capitalism appeared first on TIME.
