NRJN Trust

Feb 24, 2020

Nandan NilekaniPhoto Credit: Reuters Noida-based Stelling Technologies, which owns travel booking platform RailYatri and long-distance bus services operator IntrCity, has raised $11.1 million in a fresh funding round led by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s NRJN Family Trust. Samsung Venture Investment, the corporate venture capital arm of Seoul headquartered electronics giant Samsung, and returning investors ON Mauritius, part of impact investor Omidyar Network and venture capital firm Blume Ventures participated in the round, dubbed Series B, regulatory filings showed. The latest round takes the total capital raised by the company to $25.2 million, according to VCCEdge data. In 2018, the company raised an undisclosed sum in a Series B round led by Omidyar Network. It could not be immediately ascertained whether the latest infusion is a continuation of the 2018 round. Founded in 2011 by Manish Rathi, Kapil Raizada and Sachin Saxena, RailYatri initially began as a platform that booked train tickets, train status, seat availability among other applications. The company later diversified into intercity bus services with IntrCity SmartBus across 20 routes such as Delhi-Lucknow, Delhi-Kanpur and Mumbai-Pune among others. At the last count, the company had said it operated 50 buses and will be expanding to more than 300 buses. In August last year, the company appointed former Times Group executive Vivek Madhukar as the head of its bus travel services. In January 2018, it acquired an online food delivery platform YatraChef. RailYatri mainly competes with Yolobus , which operates a fleet of 20 buses on several routes across India. This month, it raised $600,000 in seed funding from an undisclosed investor to expand its fleet. Flixbus, one of the largest intercity bus networks in Europe with a valuation of over $2 billion, is expected to soon launch its services in India. Comment(s)