It is the world’s most downloaded ride-hailing app after Uber, and inDrive’s founder and chief executive Arsen Tomsky wants to go bigger.

Since its founding in Yakutsk in Siberia more than a decade ago, inDrive has grown to be present in nearly 900 cities in Central Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Now, Tomsky has his sights on turning it into a super-app that offers multiple services including food delivery, groceries, and financial products. 

Unlike its rivals such as Uber, Lyft, and Didi, inDrive doesn’t automatically match passengers and drivers. Instead, the algorithm recommends prices to drivers making bids for passengers, based on their origin and destination. Passengers select from these bids, and drivers can accept, decline, or counter with another offer. This model, with people setting the prices, is fairer and more transparent, and gives passengers and drivers more freedom than prices set solely by algorithms, Tomsky believes. Some drivers, though, have complained that they are often forced to agree to lower fares.

InDrive recently launched financial services, and entered the grocery business in Pakistan. Tomsky also set up Ayta AI, which helps people with a stutter sound natural on video calls. On the sidelines of the Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro in April, Tomsky spoke to Rest of World about his strategy and the role of artificial intelligence in his business. 

On what makes inDrive’s peer-to-peer fare model unique

It is a fair and transparent model, while our competitors have artificially low fares by giving heavy bonuses and incentives to drivers, and a lot of free rides and discounts to passengers. But they have high commissions or they sometimes increase fares — surge pricing, when the fares go up two or three times even. The algorithms are not transparent.  

We take just about 12% commission and we don’t set the fares, the people do — the customers and the drivers. In our system, drivers and passengers see the full information. The drivers see what price is proposed, and they can skip it if they don’t like it. Or they can use special filters: “I don’t want to see too cheap fares.” They have full freedom of choice. And they will not have any negative consequences for skipping. It’s a very different feeling, like being small entrepreneurs.  

Human connection and negotiation will always be at the core of our product.

On how AI is used in the inDrive app

Of course, we are also using AI. Within our app, the algorithm works to determine recommended pricing. Our drivers and passengers have the final say on prices they agree on, with each having the freedom to accept or reject. In some cities, we offer the alternative of not having to negotiate, letting the algorithm decide on a fare. It is a second option, not the main option. We are just testing it, and we will slowly introduce it in some cities. 

Human connection and negotiation will always be at the core of our product. I don’t want to build one more small Uber.

On inDrive’s expansion plans, and building a super-app 

We are entering new segments because we see a lot of injustice from large companies, and monopolies in too many fields. We are beginning to enter the dark store [a shop that exists only to fulfill online orders]. We are testing it in Kazakhstan, where we invested in a dark-store player called Ryadom. We will then go to other countries. 

And step by step, we are going to build something like a super-app. It’s very logical for us as we continue to expand and diversify beyond mobility. We have an official goal, to impact at least 1 billion people by 2030. We want to be across the last mile of delivery, and also in the fields of education and health care. I don’t know now how health care and education will fit into this super-app. It won’t be like a Chinese super-app. But I am sure we will find a way. We are looking to pilot in select markets.

On inDrive becoming profitable 

This year we are going to become net profitable. As I said, we avoid bonuses, discounts, promotions, and so on. And we are lean — we don’t have thousands of software engineers in Silicon Valley. We have almost 3,000 people in 28 offices around the globe. In 2022, we moved around 1,000 people from Russia because of the war, to Cyprus and Kazakhstan. We also have 300–400 people in Mexico. Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan are our other major hubs.

I don’t want to build one more small Uber.

On exiting Miami, and entering new markets

We launched in Miami [inDrive’s only U.S. market] in 2023 and left in 2025. It was a test launch for us, and we realized that operating in the U.S. is very expensive because of the increase in insurance prices. We can relaunch there in the future, but not for now. For us it makes more sense to be in developing countries, where people are more price-conscious, they value each dollar. We entered Southeast Asia recently, and we are now active in six countries there, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. 

On why fairness in business matters

I’m obsessed with the question of fairness because I’ve met with a lot of injustice in my life. We can begin with the fact that I was born in the coldest city in the world [Yakutsk]. You can call that a form of climate injustice. I’m a stutterer — that is another injustice. I’ve had domestic violence in my family, and that’s one more kind of injustice. And now I have a real chance to change this for other people with my business and philanthropy.

The Amazonian municipality of Caracaraí has 22,000 inhabitants and an overworked pharmacist named Samuel Andrade.

Andrade arrives at work at 8 a.m. to handle hundreds of prescriptions from free government clinics. Most days, he can’t get through all of them. He sometimes gets stuck for hours cross-checking drug databases to ensure nothing has been prescribed incorrectly by rural doctors. 

It is stressful work. He has to help the dozens of patients who line up at his dispensary every day, some of whom have traveled for days to get there. Sometimes he has to rush through prescriptions, and worries he will miss something dangerous.  

In April, Andrade welcomed a new assistant: artificial intelligence software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions, he told Rest of World. In the months since he started using the AI assistant, it has caught more than 50 errors, he said.

“It works instantly and uses digital rather than physical reports,” said the 34-year-old. 

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Pharmacists in Brazil began testing the technology earlier this year. Its initial success suggests it could be a game changer for the country’s overburdened primary care system. 

The South American nation has the world’s most ambitious state-backed universal health-care program, by some measures. It offers health care to everyone, everywhere, for free — even to non-citizens. It strives to serve more than 200 million people, which means most of the tens of thousands of government facilities are overstretched, particularly in rural areas where there are fewer doctors and pharmacists. 

The pharmaceutical AI assistant was developed by a Brazilian nonprofit called NoHarm, established with grants from big tech firms including Google and Amazon. 

NoHarm was the brainchild of two smart siblings: Ana Helena, a pharmacist, and her brother Henrique Dias, a computer scientist. They began working on a tech fix for the nightmare of paperwork and research required of pharmacists, often over Sunday lunches at their family home in the southern city of Porto Alegre.

They built an open-source machine learning model trained on thousands of real-world examples. To train the software, NoHarm gathered anonymized patient data and historical prescriptions. The founders fed the algorithm thousands of real-world drug combinations, dosage errors, and adverse interactions. Over time, it learned to spot patterns that even experienced professionals might miss, Dias, also the company’s chief executive officer, told Rest of World. 

It can process hundreds of prescriptions at a time, identifying potential red flags, the company said. NoHarm is designed to support decision-making, not make decisions. 

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“We provide a set of alerts, and the professional will evaluate them through the lens of the patient’s needs,” Dias said. 

Over the last seven years, NoHarm has received grants and donations of cloud services, software, and other support from Google, Oracle, Nvidia, Amazon, and the Gates Foundation. It charges private health-care facilities for its software while offering it to public-sector facilities at no cost. 

Brazil has been a latecomer to the AI party. While hospitals around the world have been adopting AI, only 1% of the more than 50,000 public health-care units in Brazil used it last year, according to a report from the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society. 

“There are other actors ahead of us,” sociologist Rodrigo Brandão, an author of the Center’s report, told Rest of World. “We’re still learning to walk.” 

Brazil’s unified health system could, however, eventually give it an edge in developing AI for health care, as the country has a uniquely large and diverse database to use for training AI. Unlike countries with fragmented systems or privatized data, Brazil’s centralized records offer a rare opportunity to integrate both public and private data sets and test AI tools at scale.

“That’s very strategic for AI development,” said Brandão. Around 20 cities in the country’s poorest regions have begun using the NoHarm software. It is being adopted in the northeast and deep in the Amazon.

Caracaraí has become an unlikely early adopter. 

While the municipality spans the Amazon with an area larger than the Netherlands, its biggest settlement is a patch of single-story homes, a few stores, and mostly dirt roads. It is inhabited chiefly by fishing and farming families.

Many in the region are underemployed and rely on government relief funds to support their households. Many inhabitants live deep in the Amazon and must travel for days by boat to obtain their prescriptions.

Andrade works out of a small dispensary, filled with shelves and cabinets of various medications, piles of paperwork, and a computer. He hands out prescriptions through a small window to the long line of people who arrive every day. 

The patients often have a combination of chronic conditions that require multiple drugs, making pharmaceutical review complicated.

“Many things slip past our eyes, or we simply don’t know,” said Andrade. “The system lets us cross-check information much faster.”

Between checking and handing out prescriptions and managing inventory, he is overworked and exhausted most days. In his five years since moving to Caracaraí to serve as the main pharmacist for the region, he hasn’t had time to visit the other outposts in the municipality where drugs are distributed.

Until this year, much of his day was spent looking up information on drugs online to cross-check prescriptions. It was challenging, he said, given the unreliable internet and uncertainty about where to find the latest information. 

Today, he just has to log in, and the software lists all the prescriptions he has to handle. It clears the ones that are safe and flags those that need further investigation. 

NoHarm highlights potential problems with labels like “medicine interaction” and “overdose.” It provides links to the data sources on which the warnings are based.

The NoHarm system has only been used in Amazonian towns for a few months now. It sometimes fails to connect to the internet to come up with answers. 

Some experts are also concerned that health professionals aren’t prepared for the rapid adoption of AI. Critics argue there is a lack of training on how these assistants operate, and workers may not know how to identify bugs, hallucinations, or errors in the software. 

“There’s a challenge for not only learning how to use this tech, but also on how to direct IT professionals to improve it, since it demands continuous adjustments and tunings,” said Brandão.

NoHarm says its AI assistant is designed for transparency: Each flagged alert includes a reference to a medical source, and pharmacists are encouraged to override suggestions based on patients’ needs. The cultural shift toward trusting AI to assist in health care decision-making may take time.

The startup said the software is still a work in progress and is continually improving. Its original training was mostly based on prescriptions from hospitals in the south of the country, which has different illnesses than Caracaraí. Certain tropical diseases, such as malaria, which are very common in Amazonian areas, are rare in Porto Alegre, the town where NoHarm is based.

“Our algorithms may have a ‘disease bias’ where it won’t detect adverse events more common in the north than the usual ones from the south,” said Dias. 

The algorithms can be quickly updated as soon as the AI assistant is trained on data from new regions and feedback from local pharmacists, he said. 

Nailon de Moraes, a rural physician, told Rest of World he appreciates the extra support with AI. He handles boatloads of villagers every day in a small clinic near the Branco River, which runs through Caracaraí. Often, they are in desperate need of medication.

The NoHarm software recently flagged four of his prescriptions as potentially dangerous. He had prescribed too high a dose of one medicine and didn’t realize that the two medicines he prescribed to another patient needed to be taken at separate times in the day. 

NoHarm stopped him from hurting his already ill patients, said de Moraes. 

“This job is a lot to handle, especially for those of us who are younger,” and less experienced, he said.

Last month, Brazil announced it is rolling out a data ownership pilot that will allow its citizens to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint — the first such nationwide initiative in the world. 

The project is administered by Dataprev, a state-owned company that provides technological solutions for the government’s social programs. Dataprev is partnering with DrumWave, a California-based data valuation and monetization firm.

Today, “people get nothing from the data they share,” Brittany Kaiser, co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation and board adviser for DrumWave, told Rest of World. “Brazil has decided its citizens should have ownership rights over their data.”

In monetizing users’ data, Brazil is ahead of the U.S., where a 2019 “data dividend” initiative by California Governor Gavin Newsom never took off. The city of Chicago successfully monetizes government data including transportation and education. If implemented, Brazil’s will be the first public-private partnership that allows citizens, rather than companies, to get a share of the global data market, currently valued at $4 billion and expected to grow to over $40 billion by 2034.

The pilot involves a small group of Brazilians who will use data wallets for payroll loans. When users apply for a new loan, the data in the contract will be collected in the data wallets, which companies will be able to bid on. Users will have the option to opt out. It works much like third-party cookies, but instead of simply accepting or declining, people can choose to make money. 

Brazil has decided its citizens should have ownership rights over their data.

The “dWallet” allows users to deposit the data generated by their daily activities into a “data savings account.” After a user accepts a company’s offer on their data, payment is cashed in the data wallet, and can be immediately moved to a bank account.

The project will be “a correction in the historical imbalance of the digital economy,” said Kaiser. Through data monetization, the personal data that companies aggregate, classify, and filter to inform many aspects of their operations will become an asset for those providing the data.

“This initiative can lay the foundation for a data ownership model that promotes financial inclusion and redefines the digital economy from a fairer perspective,” Rodrigo Assumpção, president of Dataprev, said in a statement in April.

But data protection specialists in Brazil, home to the most expansive data privacy framework in Latin America, are concerned that this commoditization may raise the price of data, making it inaccessible for smaller companies and even state offices with low budgets. The project could also widen the digital divide in a country that lacks robust digital infrastructure in rural areas.

3 in 10 Brazilians are functionally illiterate

“We will be asking half of the country that doesn’t know how to read to decide if their data can be bought for a certain fee,” Pedro Bastos, a researcher at Data Privacy Brazil, told Rest of World. “People in situations of vulnerability will say yes, and this might be used against them.”

Worldwide, data monetization has so far been led by the private sector. Companies such as Datarade, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have created data marketplaces where clients can purchase data sets for their large language models and other artificial intelligence products. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have created their own government-backed infrastructure to commercialize data. Separately, China allows companies to treat data as assets while the United Nations has said countries can add the economic value of data to their GDP calculations.

Brazil’s project stands out because it brings the private sector and the government together, “so it has a better chance of catching on,” said Kaiser.

In 2023, Brazil’s Congress drafted a bill that classifies data as personal property. The country’s current data protection law classifies data as a personal, inalienable right. The new legislation gives people full rights over their personal data — especially data created “through use and access of online platforms, apps, marketplaces, sites and devices of any kind connected to the web.”

The bill seeks to ensure companies offer their clients benefits and financial rewards, including payment as “compensation for the collecting, processing or sharing of data.” It has garnered bipartisan support, and is currently being evaluated in Congress.

We will be asking half of the country that doesn’t know how to read to decide if their data can be bought…

The project “represents a significant conceptual transition,” a spokesperson for DrumWave told Rest of World. It positions Brazil “as a global reference in data ownership initiatives.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how it could potentially harm new and small businesses, as well as vulnerable socioeconomic groups.

If approved, the bill will allow companies to collect data more quickly and precisely, while giving users more clarity over how their data will be used, according to Antonielle Freitas, data protection officer at Viseu Advogados, a law firm that specializes in digital and consumer laws. As data collection becomes centralized through regulated data brokers, the government can benefit by paying the public to gather anonymized, large-scale data, Freitas told Rest of World.

These databases are the basis for more personalized public services, especially in sectors such as health care, urban transportation, public security, and education, she said.

But similar projects elsewhere are facing pushback: In the U.S., federal data privacy bills such as the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (2022) and the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024 have stalled. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, the bills undermined laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (2020) that give users better protections for privacy violations.

“At a state level [in the U.S], there is pressure to not give up their own autonomy to federal institutions,” Victor Quintiere, a law professor at the University Center of Brasília, told Rest of World.

In Brazil, some like Maximilian Rodrigues are eager to try out the data monetization project. For Rodrigues, a computer science professor in Mato Grosso, in central Brazil, it will be an opportunity to regulate access to his data. “If you don’t accept bids, companies won’t be able to use your data,” he told Rest of World.

But not all users are as savvy. Inaf, Brazil’s institute for research on illiteracy, said last year that 95% of functionally illiterate Brazilians — three out of 10 Brazilians — had low digital proficiency. Large swaths of the country, including cities, have slow internet connectivity, which means they generate less data online. 

Data monetization could also pressure vulnerable people into forgoing their privacy for a quick payout, much like World (previously Worldcoin) has done in dozens of countries, according to Bastos. Co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, World scanned over 400,000 people’s irises in Brazil before the government suspended its operations in January for gathering data without sufficient opt-out mechanisms.

“Once you treat data as an economic asset, you are subverting the logic behind the protection of personal data,” said Bastos. The data ecosystem “will no longer be defined by who can create more trust and integrity in their relationships, but instead, it will be defined by who’s the richest.”