Chalo: International Expansion Strategy for a Mobility Technology Firm

In June 2022, Mohit Dubey, Founder and CEO of Chalo, faces a high-stakes choice: should the company launch its first international market in Manila, or delay global expansion and deepen its India play? Founded as a bus-tracking app, Chalo evolved into an integrated public-transit technology platform serving more than 40 Indian cities, tracking over 15,000 buses daily and facilitating 115 million rides by March 2022. Its solution combines live tracking with a conductor-operated POS ecosystem that accepts cash, QR, app tickets and rapid semi-open-loop card payments, including offline validation for patchy-network routes. The case spotlights a core emerging-market operations problem: bus operators can lose 25-30% of revenue to fare evasion, pilferage and weak reconciliation in cash-heavy systems. Chalo’s model improves payment speed, transparency and route-level analytics, but expansion abroad raises hard questions about business model transferability. The case introduces operator driven challenges in the bus industry in India, and highlights a firm that is using technology to address the issue. The case also discusses the international expansion strategy for the firm.