Asish Mohapatra

Dec 23, 2022

ApniBus, an intercity bus platform for Bharat, has raised pre-seed funding led by Antler India. This round also saw participation from GoodWater Capital and angels like Niraj Singh (Founder and CEO, Spinny) and Asish Mohapatra (Founder and CEO, OfBusiness). Gurgaon-based ApniBus, which has so far been operating in stealth mode, is live in 15+ cities on more than 350 routes connecting over 1000 destinations. In just 7 months, the platform is seeing over 200K monthly transactions and growing rapidly month on month. Sumit Gupta, Co-founder of ApniBus says- “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.”   ApniBus was founded in late 2021 by repeat entrepreneur Sumit Gupta and operations and mobility specialist Ravi Yadav. Sumit had earlier built YellowPedal, a full stack bus operations platform that grew to become one of the leading bus operators across North India. The idea of ApniBus evolved from that experience, with the team now taking an asset light and product led approach to the problem. Ravi brings on board expertise in mobility, having built scalable operations for mobility companies like Wheelseye, Droom and Taxi For Sure from scratch. 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. 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.”   Global early-stage VC firm Antler is one of the fastest growing VC firms in the world and plans to deploy $100M to $150M in 100+ Indian startups over the next 3 years. Share this article: