inDrive is moving beyond its auction-style ride-hailing roots to build a multipurpose platform for everyday services, starting in markets where affordability and access matter most. The company is piloting grocery delivery, payments-like flows, and mobility add-ons with a strategy tailored for “frontier” economies rather than wealthy megacities.
The approach leans on inDrive’s outsized distribution and frequency potential. The app has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times and has processed billions of trips and deliveries, according to company figures and recent Data.ai rankings that place it among the most-installed ride-hailing apps globally. The thesis: more daily touchpoints lead to higher retention and better unit economics.
A super app designed for frontier markets
Most “everything app” experiments have chased higher-income users. inDrive is targeting the opposite cohort—cost-conscious consumers in places where transport, delivery, and commerce are still under-penetrated. Its signature feature, rider-driver price negotiation, created trust with users looking to stretch budgets; that same playbook now informs how it prices and fulfills essentials.
The company says its delivery arm has scaled to tens of millions of orders over the past year, with strong momentum in the latest quarters. Grocery is the first major step beyond rides because it boosts weekly frequency and basket data, two pillars that super apps rely on to cross-sell. As GSMA and World Bank research show, mobile-first adoption in emerging markets accelerates when services bundle payments, transport, and commerce into a single, lightweight app.
Why Kazakhstan is the launchpad
inDrive’s grocery debut landed in Kazakhstan, where it offers thousands of SKUs and promises delivery in about 15 minutes across select zones. Early pilots delivered a net promoter score above 80 and repeat behavior of roughly five grocery orders per user per month, the company says. To meet demand, inDrive has increased local dark-store capacity by nearly a third.
There is a broader ecosystem story, too. A Dealroom analysis produced with the Astana Hub highlights that Kazakhstan’s tech sector has grown sharply in recent years, with platform adoption rising and local spending shifting online. That backdrop, combined with a fragmented grocery landscape and significant price sensitivity, creates an opening for a low-cost, high-reliability operator.
inDrive frames the value proposition as an “Aldi for online groceries”: curated, affordable baskets and tight last-mile operations rather than endless assortment. If the model holds, the company plans to replicate it across priority markets in Latin America, North Africa, and South Asia, including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Mexico, Pakistan, and Peru.
Can inDrive succeed where others stalled?
Super apps are difficult to build outside of China, where WeChat and Alipay benefited from unique network effects. Southeast Asia offers partial templates in Gojek and Grab, yet both needed years of subsidy-heavy growth and deep payments integration to reach scale. In the Middle East, Careem’s “mini app” ecosystem shows another viable path via partnerships. By contrast, several fast-delivery players, including Getir and JOKR, have retrenched as quick-commerce economics tightened.
inDrive argues it has a structural edge: a vast supply network of drivers and couriers, a user base accustomed to negotiating price, and an asset-light model that can flex take rates and payout schedules by city. The company is also active in freight and same-day delivery, creating cross-utilization for couriers that can smooth peak demand and lower per-order costs.
Competition is real. Uber has layered on food delivery, and in Latin America, Rappi, iFood, and Mercado Libre set a high bar for speed and selection. inDrive’s counter is focus: serve customers who trade down on price and prefer transparent fees over promotions that vanish once subsidies end.
Playbook: partner-first, city-specific
Rather than bolt on every service, inDrive says it will build only where it has clear operational know-how, and partner elsewhere. It has already backed local grocery upstarts such as Krave Mart in Pakistan and is exploring micro-mobility and public transport integrations to extend coverage without heavy capex.
City-level configuration is a recurring theme. Pricing, driver payouts, and in-app take rates can be tuned to local demand patterns, especially in freight and courier categories where cash flow to workers matters. This modularity—akin to Careem’s mini apps or Grab’s city ops playbooks—aims to avoid the “one-size-fits-all” pitfall that undermined earlier super app attempts.
Risks and what to watch
Grocery delivery is notoriously unforgiving: spoilage, picking errors, and underutilized dark stores can sink margins. Regulatory scrutiny around worker protections and platform safety is intensifying as well. inDrive says safety training, customer support, and transparent dispute resolution are priorities as it scales new services.
The next 12 months will test whether the frontier-market blueprint works at scale. If inDrive can keep delivery times tight, maintain everyday-low pricing, and convert riders into repeat shoppers—while resisting the subsidy trap—it could unlock a sustainable version of the super app model that has eluded many Western challengers.