IntrCity by RailYatri on Monday raised over ₹100 crore in the latest round of funding, a majority of which it intends to invest in IntrCity SmartBus. The company launched its intercity bus service last year and entered Mumbai with a service to Ahmedabad in October. It has since started plying on routes from Mumbai to Hyderabad, Goa and Pune.
Speaking with The Hindu , Manish Rathi, CEO and co-founder, IntrCity, said plans were under way to increase the number of buses on all existing routes in the future.
“There will be a lot of focus given to existing routes, where there is high demand. We started with one bus between Delhi and Lucknow, where we now have 10 buses. We will be replicating the same at other hubs such as Mumbai,” he said.
Mr. Rathi said the company plans to ramp up the fleet to 300 buses by the end of the year and also aims to create new hubs in cities like Ahmedabad and Pune to expand to other territories
The service currently has 84 buses across 18 hubs, covering 65 destinations and serving around four lakh travellers per month, a company statement said. The bus service was started on the back of data gathered and analysed by their portal RailYatri, which was launched in 2014.
Mr. Rathi said they aim to expand their fleet to 2,000 buses and around 40 cities by 2022. “Our data tells us that there is a demand surplus of around 20,000 buses on routes touching these 40 cities. We aim to capture around 10% of the market.”
The service offers luxury sleeper buses that run overnight between two cities. The buses are provided by third party operators but designed to specifications outlined by IntrCity and have facilities such as on-board washrooms, WiFi, automatic passenger information system and on-board infotainment. Mr. Rathi said over the last year the company has worked on an AI-enabled driver alert system to ensure driver safety and has expanded lounges across cities.
