RailYatri.in, a train travel tech start-up has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Helion Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, an investment firm established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar with his wife Pam.
Existing investors Blume Ventures and Ujama also participated in this round.
The Noida-based start-up, which provides crowd-sourced information related to train travel will use the money on product development and scale up operations.
“Millions of train travellers in India make uninformed travel choices and end up spending more,” RailYatri chief executive Manish Rathi said. “Our goal is to reach out to every train traveller and empower them by bridging the information and services gap.” He declined to reveal the amount raised in this round.
Rathi cofounded the start-up along with Kapil Raizada and Sachin Saxena, who were his colleagues at technology company GlobalLogic.
Started in 2011 as Stelling Technologies, they built an information services platform for passengers in collaboration with Centre For Railway Information Systems. Three years later they launched a mobile app which provides real-time information like train status, platforms and insights that can predict the availability of seats. It also provides information about food and taxi services. The company has partnered with taxi companies in 20 cities and food vendors across 300 stations.
“RailYatri is the railway enquiry window in a common man’s mobile but without the hassle of long queues,” said Rahul Chandra, managing director of Helion Advisors. “It’s founding team comes with the expertise of designing and engineering scalable consumer products and services.”
In India, nearly 25 million passengers are on the move every day. RailYatri provides information for over 9,000 locations and 14,500 trains including local trains and metros.
COMMents
SHARE