ApniBus Raises Pre-Seed Funding Led by Antler India The startup aims to deliver a highly superior solution with a mobile-first application providing real-time information on bus schedules, inventory and prices to facilitate choice and informed decision making
By Saptak Bardhan •
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ApniBus on Monday announced to have raised pre-seed funding led by Antler India. This round also saw participation from GoodWater Capital and angels like Niraj Singh and Asish Mohapatra.
"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," said Sumit Gupta, co-founder, ApniBus.
"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 over 95 per cent 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," said Nitin Sharma, partner, Antler India.
Gurgaon-based ApniBus is live in over 15 cities on more than 350 routes connecting over 1000 destinations. In just 7 months, the platform is seeing over 200,000 monthly transactions and growing rapidly month on month. ApniBus was founded in late 2021 by repeat entrepreneur Sumit Gupta and operations and mobility specialist Ravi Yadav. The just-in-time booking solution offered by ApniBus is set to impact millions of intercity travelers while also helping bus operators with ticketing, inventory and fleet management. ApniBus is a full stack solution for commuters to find, track and book their intercity bus via a mobile app. The startup is going after a $100 billion affordable intercity travel opportunity with an initial focus on tier-3 and tier-4 markets, the largest market for this solution. The current experience in this segment is completely broken, and the startup aims to deliver a highly superior solution with a mobile-first application providing real-time information on bus schedules, inventory and prices to facilitate choice and informed decision making.
