Nihon Kotsu as the "Prince of Taxis." The company was founded as a sole proprietorship in 1928 and reorganized as a stock company in December 1945. It began as a limousine operator and expanded to taxi service in 1940. NK operates the most popular taxi hailing mobile application in Japan, Japan Taxi. Toyota invested 500 million yen in the app in 2017, followed by a second 7.5 billion investment in 2018. Tokyo Musen, a major rival of Nihon Kotsu in the Tokyo area, joined the app later that year in an effort to counterbalance foreign rivals such as Uber and Didi Chuxing.
Beat (app) ride-hailing service was acquired by MyTaxi in February 2017, and renamed to Beat. MyTaxi is a subsidiary of the automotive manufacturer Daimler AG. Before the Greek firm was integrated into the Daimler cadre of corporations, Beat raised approximately $7 million in Series capital in its first two years of operations. Beat (app) Beat is responsible for developing a taxi cab and peer-to-peer-ridesharing mobile application, the Beat app, for smartphones and other mobile devices. Beat's headquarters are located in Athens, Greece, where it is popular among locals. However, about 90 percent of the company’s ride-booking activity is abroad, in South America,