PENGUINUP

PenguinUp is a carpooling + taxi-sharing platform that helps people save time, money and get a convenient door to door ride. We connect people to share rides and the costs (parking, fuel, toll or taxi fare) to or from the events, festivals, airports, offices etc. By filling up empty seats in vehicles, PenguinUp helps reduce the overall carbon footprint and provides a sustainable way of transportation. Our vision is to be the single mobility platform for all of people’s transport needs. The idea was born out of personal challenges faced by Vaibhav, one of the co-founders. Vaibhav’s desire to travel the world (with work or pleasure) was hindered by limitations of public transport, high taxi prices in Norway and absence of any functioning ridesharing platform. This led to the birth of PenguinUp. The 2 co-founders (Sona and Vaibhav) have been working on this project full-time for the past 1.5 years. Penguins are an extremely intelligent species. They are independent yet social. They live in colonies and hunt in groups but have their own identity. Inefficiency in heat conservation can be lethal for Penguins, so they sleep together in colonies during the harsh winters. Inspired by Penguins, we want to evoke this feeling of community among humans as well. By creating groups and networks for sharing rides, we are bridging people’s social media connections to the real world. Our goal is to eventually connect these communities into a global community. Lets PenguinUp!

The festival has approximately 40,000 attendees and it will give us an opportunity to test our prototype with these attendees. We feel it will be a win-win situation where we can test our prototype, receive feedback while helping attendees with a convenient travel experience. This can also increase the number of attendees who would otherwise face challenges in coming to the festival and support the ‘community feeling’ of the festival.