In this growing online world, everything becomes easy from online shopping to online delivery of food and groceries. Travelling seems to be much easier than ever. After the entry of the travel-tech companies in the space has removed the need of seeking help from travel agents for booking hotels, flights, buses and paying them a fortune, and unfortunately, get the travel plan according to them.
Several players in the travel-tech space are there and ramping up their efforts to get into the top position. In recent days New Delhi-based smart bus startup gogoBus has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by AI-based travel app ixigo.
According to an official statement ixigo’s investment is the part of a gogoBus’s first round of funding, other than that they have some prominent angel investors including Rajesh Sawhney (Co-founder & CEO, Innerchef) and Abhishek Sharma (COO, Dineout). With the first round of investment, gogoBus started its operations on multiple routes in North India and will be going to expand the product and technology team.
What they do with the fund
Amit Gupta and Avinash Singh Bagri founded gogoBus in January 2020. The full-stack mobility startup and has an asset-light model. They have standardized brand new buses, self-operated lounge, pre-defined pickup points, and a strong in-house tech platform for booking, tracking, and in-bus safety features.
Amit Gupta Explained that gogoBus provides several features including luxury seats, GPS Enabled buses for safety, predefined stops, and trained, verified and uniformed drivers to give a great experience to the travelers.
”Gupta says our first priority is to set new standards when it comes to comfort and safety in the bus travel” Gupta also said that we have covered more than 500,000 km within one month of its launch.
Why ixigo invested in gogoBus
Ixigo Founded in 2007, ixigo uses Artificial Intelligence for deal discovery, personalized recommendations, dynamic marketing, airfare prediction, infrastructure cost optimization, business intelligence, and providing automated customer service.
ixigo has a user base over 170 million travelers, aims to disrupt the bus travel market with this deal.
In India, the bus market is quite attractive with over 5 billion bus trips a year. The prior operating experience, domain knowledge of gogoBus team, coupled with ixigo’s demand-side scale will help disrupt the bus travel market in a big way. Rajnish Kumar, co-founder, and CTO of ixigo said in the statement.
Aloke Bajpai, co-founder, and CEO of ixigo, also said that while buses are one of the most popular means of intercity transport in India, the market is very fragment and non-standardized, there are many pain points of the travelers and that needs to be solved.
Bajpai ended up saying that travelers often end up planning a last-minute intercity bus trip due to lack of availability on train or high flight fares. gogoBus allows travelers to do this in a smart and affordable manner.
