[Funding alert] ApniBus raises funding in Pre-Seed round

Intercity bus platform ApniBus has raised an undisclosed amount in its Pre seed funding round from Antler India.

Other angle investors including GoodWater Capital, Niraj Singh (Founder and CEO, Spinny) and AsishMohapatra (Founder and CEO, OfBusiness) also participated in this round.

Gurgaon-based ApniBuswas founded in 2021 by repeat entrepreneur Sumit Gupta and operations and mobility specialist Ravi Yadav, The platform offered on-time booking solution and is geared to help bus operators with ticketing, inventory and fleet management as well as impacting millions of intercity commuters.

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It Is a full stack solution for commuters to find, track and book their intercity bus through a single mobile app.

“About 1 to 3 crore Indians travel via intercity buses daily. However, this market is still entirely offline, chaotic, inefficient and has remained the same for decades. There is absolutely no visibility into the bus schedules with less than 5% bookings happening online, largely covering the Tier-1 intercity travel market. The Tier-3 and Tier-4 intercity travel market is a massive whitespace and ripe for transformation. Coming from a small town ourselves, Ravi and I personally experienced the extreme inconvenience involved with intercity travel. ApniBus is going to significantly improve this experience with tech intervention. We are digitizing the bus journey and have built solutions to manage their real time schedules with real time inventory, so that commuters don’t have to wait at bus stops for hours or travel on long journeys with no seat. We are already seeing great traction in the cities we are live in and have ambitious plans for ramping up operations across the country”, said, Sumit Gupta, Co-founder of ApniBus.

The startup is live In over 15 cities on over 350 routes connecting over 1000 destinations and since its inception it is seeing over 200,000 monthly transactions and growing rapidly month after month.

The platform aims to provide a vastly superior solution with a mobile-first application, which provides real-time information on bus schedules, inventory and prices to facilitate choice and informed decision making.

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Commenting on the investment, Nitin Sharma, Partner at Antler India added – “The Bharat customer has embraced digital experiences for everything from UPI payments to Amazon e-commerce, but the essential needs around intercity travel remain unsolved for 3 crore travelers every single day, with 95%+ of buses not digitized. Intercity bus travel for the Tier-3 and Tier-4 markets has been underserved by existing players and we are thrilled to support ApniBus in its journey of transforming this space. With ApniBus, Sumit and Ravi are successfully cracking the complex challenge of digitizing the intercity bus stack along with solid unit economics. Apnibus has the potential to be one of the biggest platforms in mobility in India.”

About ApniBus

ApniBus is an online intercity bus ticket booking and live bus tracking app, currently live in 15+ cities covering more than 300 routes and soon to be launched in other cities across India.