(Photo by Elvert Barnes)

Yet another ride-hailing startup is coming to D.C., this one catering mainly to women drivers and riders.

This fall, Safr, a ride-hailing app that launched in Boston last year, will begin rolling out in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, according to a release from the company. It’s also going to expand into Orlando, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco.

Safr’s model is geared toward making ridesharing safer for women, according to company CEO Syed Gilani. Originally, the plan was to create a women-only platform called Chariot for Women, with only women drivers and riders, but that idea faced serious legal obstacles (namely, that it’s probably illegal to refuse service to people on the basis of their gender).

So they adjusted the model: now, anybody is allowed to sign up as a driver or a rider with Safr, but individual users are allowed to pick a gender preference for their driver (or vice versa). (The company’s press materials still say it’s a “women-only” ride-hailing service, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.)

Still, Gilani says the model has mainly attracted women, which make up a small share of drivers for other ride-hailing companies (only 14 percent at Uber). He says the company now has around 6,000 drivers in Boston, and around 90 percent of them are women. The company has started its onboarding process for drivers who’ve signed up in D.C., Gilani says. There are around 150 so far, and all of them are women.

(Gilani also told DCist that the company is currently looking for a female CEO, and that he’s one of very few men employed by the company.)

“It’s not many, but it’s enough for us to start our first phase [of the rollout],” Gilani says. “Once we start doing targeted marketing, I think we’ll obtain the same number of people as in Massachusetts.”

Part of what Safr says makes it, well, safer, is the extensive hiring and background check process the company makes all its prospective drivers go through. Company reps meet with and interview prospective drivers in person, do an in-depth background check, and are offered a safety training session. Safr says it also pays its drivers more money than Uber and Lyft, though it charges riders about 15 percent more than UberX.

Some other safety features in the app: there’s a “color matching” feature, where the driver and the rider are each assigned a color for a ride. The driver or the rider has to verify the color before the ride can start. There’s also an “SOS” button in the app, where a driver or a rider can choose to contact Safr, 911, or an emergency contact.

Safr isn’t the first app of its kind: See Jane Go, another company devised as an all-women ride-hailing app in California, folded earlier this year after not being able to get its financial footing.

The larger ride-hailing companies have often been accused of failing to keep its riders and drivers safe. Last year, Uber was targeted by a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of having a lackluster background check process that gives violent people access to victims. “Uber has done everything possible to continue using low-cost, woefully inadequate background checks on drivers and has failed to monitor drivers for any violent or inappropriate conduct after they are hired,” the suit alleges.

D.C. has had its fair share of scary stories about violent Uber incidents: In the last year, a man was arrested after sexually assaulting an Uber passenger who had nodded off in his back seat, and another man was accused of posing as an Uber driver to rape a college student who thought she was his passenger. Drivers also face dangers: a woman was arrested in Prince George’s County in June for allegedly attacking her Uber driver with a knife after he wouldn’t change the radio station he was listening to and tried to end the ride early.

But despite its claims of dedication to safety, Safr hasn’t been immune to controversy. First, there are the questions of legality and gender discrimination that popped up when the company launched last year. Then, Gilani, the CEO, was arrested last June on accusations of fraud regarding a company he was involved with in the Virgin Islands.

Kelly O’Shea, a spokesperson for Safr, says that Syed is still the CEO of the company and they’re confident the charges will be dropped. “It has been very frustrating to have this drag on but we are confident that it will be resolved quickly,” she said via email.

Gilani says the company will launch in the D.C. area in the fall, but there’s no timeline yet because they’re still in the process of onboarding so many drivers.

“From a safety perspective, from a women empowerment perspective, people work late nights, and they should be able to feel as secure as anybody else,” Gilani says. “[Security] should not stop with the daylight hours.”

This post has been updated to remove an Uber incident that did not take place in D.C.