Investment bank USB has handed over $3.4 million to Ingogo, the taxi-booking app that has taken Australia by storm. The app is now valued at an impressive $25 million and is preparing to be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2014. The Sydney firm gives customers the chance to call taxis as well as pay for their ride prior to the journey. The company boasts 1000 payment terminals that allow drivers to receive payments for rides not taken using a passenger’s app also, maximising both sales and efficiency. It comes just months after Ingogo rose $1 million in August, bringing total funding to $7.5 million and valuing the company at $25 million. “We’re looking at other areas we believe we can deploy the payment platform we built beyond the taxi market and there’s a lot of things we want to do to keep building on the business,” Ingogo managing director Hamish Petrie told The Australian Financial Review. Ingogo claims its app has been downloaded 70,000 times since its launch last year. Mr Petrie of the company claims 15 per cent of Sydney taxi drivers take bookings through this app. The company takes the same 10 per cent booking fee for taxi rides as incumbent services, but pays 6 per cent of that fee as a rebate back to drivers. “You’re looking at an industry that hasn’t been disrupted to date – newspapers, music and a range of other industries have. Up until this point, it hadn’t really happened in the taxi environment,” Mr Petrie said. “It’s really the development of apps and mobile payments that’s really brought that opportunity forward. You wouldn’t have been able to do this three or four years ago because the technology wasn’t right.” So, what do you think, would you use an app to generate more fairs?