Prod­uct man­agers work­ing in New York will know a thing or two about the impos­si­bil­i­ty of hail­ing cabs at peak times. But thanks to Fifth Avenue’s new res­i­dent, Get­Taxi, that could all be about to change.

The start­up was found­ed in Tel Aviv in 2011, but its cab hail­ing app is now being used by over a mil­lion peo­ple in 20 coun­tries, includ­ing Lon­don and Moscow. And now it’s open­ing offices in New York. But the per­spic­u­ous prod­uct man­ag­er will be ask­ing, what makes Get­Taxi stand out from the crowd?

No nasty sur­pris­es 

The startup’s app is avail­able on Black­ber­ry, iOS and Android devices and it hooks up with a GPS sys­tem to let users order a cab from their smart­phones and track its loca­tion and ETA. But it dif­fers from the com­pe­ti­tion by part­ner­ing with black cars(which it calls G‑cars) to cre­ate a fair pric­ing and pay­ment reg­i­men – there’ll be no surge pric­ing as with its com­peti­tor Uber, no nasty sur­pris­es for being stuck in traf­fic, just a flat fare between neighborhoods.

Hav­ing recent­ly secured $12 mil­lion in Series C fund­ing led by Kre­os Cap­i­tal, the start­up has so far accu­mu­lat­ed a total of $42 mil­lion in invest­ment. And no prod­uct man­ag­er could fail to be impressed by its phe­nom­e­nal growth rate: it’s expand­ing by 50 per­cent every quar­ter and is on course to hit $130 mil­lion in annu­al rev­enue by the close of 2013.

Its research shows that 20,000 New York­ers a day fail to get a much-need­ed cab between 3 and 7 p.m., and that there were no few­er than 400,000 unfilled rides in June 2013 alone, part­ly because of the lim­i­ta­tions of the city’s 13,000 yel­low cabs. One thou­sand G‑Cars will be rov­ing the streets by the year’s end, and many thou­sands more are in the pipeline for the next cou­ple of years. A new ride-shar­ing fea­ture will also soon be available.

No more nightmares?

GetTaxi’s U.S. CEO, Jing Her­man, said, “We are incred­i­bly excit­ed to be launch­ing Get­Taxi in New York, and to be rolling out our launch with hun­dreds of G‑Cars, which have been made pos­si­ble with our black car fleet part­ners. The first pain point we plan to solve is the after­noon shift change predica­ment, and we intend to become the go-to car ser­vice app for all New Yorkers.”