Public transport in Kenya is largely traditional and the majority of operators, especially road travel operators, require customers to physically book their tickets at their offices, even if they have made advance travel plans. There is no provision for seat assignment on other flights.
Booking platforms such as BuuPass are emerging in this space to try to fill this gap. BuuPass actively seeks to promote order in a highly fragmented sector by helping operators digitize their operations.
Founded in Kenya seven years ago, the company is backed by 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 others. angel investor.
“This funding will allow us to increase our market share in East Africa and invest in growth activities, particularly in Kenya and Uganda. It’s about growing, so we hire specifically the growth side teams and technical experts to be able to build systems at scale.” Founded Buupas in 2016 with Wycliffe Omondi.
BuuPass, a B2B2C full-stack marketplace, provides operators with a bus management system (BMS) to manage operations, inventory and sales. It then connects passengers to a marketplace where they search, compare and book tickets using various channels such as websites, apps and USSD codes.
BMS includes a POS solution that captures transactions and provides access to parcel management modules.
BuuPass says operators using its BMS will be able to better manage their fleet and business, access data they can use to derive insights, and increase sales from online bookings while reducing cash leaks. can.
The company says it processes about 12,000 transactions per day across its booking channels and has recorded more than 9 million ticket sales to date. Total merchandise value for 2022 put him at just over $30 million.
It supports a total of 1,200 vehicles from over 25 bus companies, including the oldest, Easy Coach. Travelers can also book air and train tickets, especially useful for travelers traveling between cities using the domestic rail network.
In Kenya, BuuPass partnered with Safaricom, the parent company of mobile money service M-Pesa, in a deal to facilitate train bookings in 2017.
“By partnering with Safaricom, we were able to secure an agreement with Kenya Railways (the operator of the national rail network) to validate our solutions and our ability to build solutions for high value transactions. It also helped us think about the scale at which we were able to build trust in the marketplace and develop a solution that could process millions of transactions and provide a seamless experience for our end users. It was a great validation for us to prove our reliability in ,” said Kabra.
Sonia and Omondi met in 2013 at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, USA and developed an interest in entrepreneurship and an interest in providing solutions to the emerging market transportation sector, and founded BuuPass, the university’s first entrepreneurial club. co-founded. In 2016, they won his $1 million Hult Prize. This was a Bill Clinton-backed grant that helped launch his BuuPass (then known as Magic Bus Ticketing) as his B2C platform in Kenya.
However, they quickly realized that this idea was not feasible as most bus companies’ operations are overwhelmingly manual and must be prioritized for digitization.
“We went deep into the market and realized there was a bigger problem with bus operators. We had a lot of cash outflows and we couldn’t digitize and access the users who go online every day, so we built a bus management system for them,” Kabra said.
