Shuttl, the on-demand bus aggregation platform which recently got suspended in Gurgaon, has raised $20 million in its latest Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with the participation of Sequoia Capital and Times Internet,for what it calls, “‘future of the public transport” service.
With the capital raised in this funding round, the company is now looking to further strengthen its technology as well as expand its business to other regions of the nation.
As a part of this funding deal, Bejul Somaia, who is the managing director of Lightspeed India Partners Advisors will also joins the company’s board. He said:
What excites Lightspeed about Shuttl is the opportunity for the company to have massive positive social impact by helping address the problems of transportation, safety and pollution. Solving daily travel in a safe, affordable and green way has great potential.
The company started operations around eight months ago, in April 2015 and was founded by Deepanshu Malviya and Amit Singh. Earlier, it had raised $3 million in seed funding from a group of angel investors.
Shuttl is a bus aggregating platform which offers shuttle bus service to its commuters in Delhi-NCR. It is now planning to expand to other cities as well. It claims to offer services such as good buses, reserved seats, flexibility in timing and economically viability.
You can access the service using its mobile application. There are just three simple steps required to book service: register account with the app, pick up a boarding point & drop point and time of commencement and you get the riding pass.
The mobile based minibus service is aimed at making daily commutation more convenient. The company’s vehicles are air-conditioned and operate with high frequency on fixed routes at a very economical price point.
The company claims to be offering around 15,000 rides on a daily basis. The price points for a ride range from Rs. 20 to Rs. 100. Since the company started operations, it claims to have facilitated more than 8,00,000 rides. It is now targeting 50,000 rides a day with 600-700 buses on the platform by the coming six months.
Amit Singh, co-founder of the company, said,
While piloting ideas on transport, we realised the incumbent opportunity in solving the problem of daily commute. There on we started building a platform that brought in predictability, trust and dignity to the consumer. Based on extensive data modeling on traffic patterns, we are increasing our services and plying more buses on the right routes.
Last week, Shuttl suspended its operations in Gurgaon, along with Ola Shuttle and ZipGo as they didn’t had the correct permits for operating shuttle services and don’t fall under Haryana Contract Carriage Permit Act 1988, 1993, 2001, 2004, and 2013. It was also reported that the authority has seized 20 buses.
Shuttl will compete against the likes of rBus and ZipGo which are currently operating in Mumbai and Bangalore, respectively. Ola has also entered into this segment and has committed to invest around Rs. 100-150 crore for its shuttle services.
However, Shuttl seems to be quite ahead of its competition as the company has already raised its Series A round of funding, while its competitors are still operating at seed funding stage.
