The e-hailing service beating Uber and Bolt – that you probably haven’t heard of

InDrive beat Uber and Bolt in a recent media sentiment report conducted by Press Pulse.

Press Pulse is an AI sentiment-measuring system for media reports. It focuses on South African business reporting from top-tier media publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure.

It does this by ranking the tone of articles into positive, neutral, or negative categories, and then determining the overall sentiment score of a brand.

Press Pulse also takes the reach and influence of the publication into account.

For example, the more positive articles a company receives, the better its sentiment ranking will be. It also holds true for the inverse – more negative media coverage equals a worse ranking.

The system uses natural language processing and deep learning for accurate sentiment detection.

Uber vs Bolt vs InDrive

We used Press Pulse to compare several of the most popular e-hailing services in South Africa and found that the lesser-known service InDrive outperformed the two largest, Uber and Bolt.

Here are the results:

InDrive took the lead with the highest sentiment score in 2025. It announced earlier in 2025 that it had taken several measures to improve security, which could be a contributing factor to this result.

Its business model is also popular as it is quite different from other e-hailing services, allowing its drivers to keep 99% of fare income.

Uber and Bolt ranked significantly lower in media sentiments, as they have faced more negative coverage. For example, MyBroadband recently announced that Uber and Bolt are allowing cars with zero-star safety ratings for rides.