Easy Taxi — a Samwer brothers app — launches in the Middle East with $7M

Easy Taxi — a competitor to cab-hailing apps such as Hailo, Taxi Magic, and TaxiMojo — received $7 million today and is expanding to three regions: the Middle East, North Africa, and Hong Kong.

Easy Taxi comes from tech incubator Rocket Internet and launched two years ago in 2011. In order to widen Easy Taxi’s footprint, Rocket Internet partnered with iMENA, an investor in the Middle East and North Africa. The company provided today’s funding and hopes to collaborate with Rocket Internet to find the best taxi-app business model for the area.

Easy Taxi is otherwise available in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It currently has over 60,000 taxi drivers looped into the service, and over two million people have downloaded the app.

It already has 500 drivers signed up in Hong Kong.

iMENA cofounder and managing director Khaldoon Tabaza explained in a statement that he is confident Easy Taxi will do well in the region and hopes the company will help “redefine the online business in the Middle East and set the path for a successful and profitable future.”

Rocket Internet is headquartered in Berlin and was founded in 2007. It is the brainchild of the Samwer brothers, who are otherwise known for taking existing companies and creating “clones” of them abroad.