This startup offered ride-hailing for women years before Uber and Lyft — and its founder isn’t shying away from the competition

Uber is starting to let women request women drivers. It’s about time, says Jillian Anderson.

Anderson founded HERide, which started offering rides in Atlanta in 2022 — three years before Uber announced last month that it would start allowing women to request female drivers on its app.

Anderson said she got the idea for HERide while working as a ride-hailing driver herself. Many of the women Anderson picked up after dark told her that male drivers often asked to take the ride off-app or tried to get their contact information, she told Business Insider.

“After hearing endless stories like that for a couple years, I was like, this sounds like a feature that Uber and Lyft could just create,” Anderson said. “Why haven’t they implemented anything like this?”

Instead of waiting for the companies to act, Anderson said she started coding her own app, recruiting women drivers, and creating HERide as an alternative. Today, the app operates in Atlanta, including at Hartsfield—Jackson Atlanta International Airport, as well as nearby Athens, Georgia.

While ride-hailing is nothing new for most Americans, apps like HERide — and Uber’s newest feature, called “Women Preferences” — show one potential avenue for growth in the industry: Offering special rides and services to specific groups of people, from women to older people.

Uber said in July that it would pilot its rides-for-women feature in a handful of cities. Already, the company offers rides for teens and a simplified version of the app for senior citizens. Lyft also has an option for women and nonbinary riders to request a woman driver.

Besides women, HERide also markets its service to LGBTQ+ clients, DeVynne Starks, the company’s cofounder and director of marketing and communications, told Business Insider.

“We don’t just want only women to be safe,” she said. “We truly do want to enforce safer ride-sharing practices for everyone.”

With Uber unveiling its own rides-for-women feature, HERide is now betting that it will have an edge over its bigger competitors in the places where it operates.

Anderson points to one advantage: HERide guarantees riders a woman driver. Uber, meanwhile, says that its Women Preferences feature “increases your chances of being matched with a woman driver,” though “it’s not guaranteed.”

Another is that HERide uses a rate card to determine its fares instead of fluctuating rates based on demand or an even more complicated model like Uber’s upfront pricing, Anderson said.

Before they ride, HERide’s users can use a fare estimator widget that Anderson said she coded herself and added to the ride-hailing service’s website. “It’s probably the No. 1 question that we get before people actually download the app,” she said about the price of rides.

HERide drivers, meanwhile, get 80% of each fare for rides that they complete, though Anderson says that that will be closer to 70% in the future to make the company profitable. Some Uber and Lyft drivers have told Business Insider that they often get less than half of the fare that customers pay.

Anderson said that she wants to retain drivers, including those who make ride-hailing their full-time job.

“If we’re paying them a fair wage, I believe that we’ll stay competitive in the space,” Anderson said.

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