Nikos Drandakis started as a programmer. He worked on his first venture in the late 1990s with a tech startup called Suppline.com, a marketplace for B2B supplies. Two years later, Suppline.com was sold.
In 2006, Nikos, with two other co-founders, launched sync.gr, a blog aggregator and social media application for bloggers, located in Greece.
In 2011, Drandakis and three other co-founders started Taxibeat, receiving seed capital from Openfund and obtaining up to a total of $ 7m. In February 2017, MyTaxi, a subsidiary of Daimler AG, acquires Taxibeat. The company was rebranded as “Beat.”
Beat tries to differentiate from its competence with a local approachment. They want to integrate with cities where they work, helping governments to solve transport issues.
In the new stage of Beat, the company led by Drandakis has focused on expansion in Latin America. Beat already works in Peru, Chile, and Colombia, and extended its service to Mexico City since February 2019.
Among the company’s plans, it is expanding in Medellín, Cali (Colombia), Guadalajara and Monterrey (Mexico). Beat’s goal is to dominate the South American market in the next two or three years.
