BuuPass, which is actively looking to promote order in the highly fragmented public transport sector by helping operators to digitize their operations, has raised $1.3 million pre-seed funding from the Founders Factory Africa, FrontEnd Ventures, Adaverse, Gullit, Five35, Renew Capital, Changecom, XA Network, Ajim Capital, Artha Ventures, Daba Finance, Google Black Founders Fund and several angel investors.
The company, which was founded in Kenya seven years ago, plans to first scale in Kenya and Uganda, before exploring other markets backed.
“The funding will enable us to invest in growth activities, increasing our market share in East Africa, with a focus on Kenya and Uganda. We will hire a team especially on the growth side, and technology experts so that we can build systems for scale because our plan is to become a pan-African infrastructure for long distance transportation,” said co-CEO, Sonia Kabra, who co-founded BuuPass with Wycliffe Omondi in 2016.
Why The Investors Invested
According to the company, it processes over 12,000 transactions every day throughout its booking platforms and has sold over 9 million tickets to date. In 2022, its gross merchandise value was slightly more than $30 million.
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It serves a total fleet of 1,200 vehicles from over 25 bus operators, including Easy Coach, one of the oldest. Travelers can also book aircraft and train tickets, which is especially useful for those who use the country’s railway network for intercity travel.
In Kenya, BuuPass won a contract to simplify railway bookings in 2017 in collaboration with Safaricom, the parent firm of mobile money provider M-Pesa.
“Partnering with Safaricom enabled us to land the Kenya Railways (operators of the national train grid) deal and validated our solution and capacity to build solutions for high-value transactions. It also enabled us to build trust in the market, and helped us think about scale such that we have developed solutions capable of handling millions of transactions and providing a seamless experience for the end user. It’s been a great validation for us to prove our credibility in the market,” said Kabra.
A Look At What The Startup Does
Operators can manage their operations, inventories, and sales with a bus management system (BMS) from BuuPass, a B2B2C full-stack marketplace. It then links them to its marketplace, where customers can browse, compare, and purchase tickets through a variety of platforms, including websites, mobile apps, and USSD codes.
In order to record transactions and give users access to a parcel management module, the BMS has a point-of-sale solution.
Operators that use BuuPass’ BMS, according to the company, are able to better manage their fleets and operations, receive access to data they can use to gain insights, and reduce cash leakages while boosting the amount of money they make from online reservations.
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When Kabra and Omondi first connected in 2013 at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, the United States, they co-founded BuuPass, the school’s first entrepreneurship club, as a result of their shared interest in entrepreneurship and desire to offer solutions for the transport sector in emerging markets. They received the $1 million Hult Prize in 2016, a grant supported by Bill Clinton, which enabled them to introduce BuuPass (then known as Magic Bus Ticketing) as a B2C platform in Kenya.
They soon understood, nevertheless, that the proposal was impractical because the majority of bus firms still operated almost entirely manually, necessitating the priority of digitalization.
“We went deeper into the market, and saw that there was a bigger problem with the bus operators; they were mostly using pen and paper to do ticketing, they had no transparency into their sales. There were a lot of cash leakages, and they were not able to digitize and access the users who are coming online every day. And so, we built a bus management system for them,” said Kabra.
BuuPass transport
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard