Excl: Travel planning student startup out of IIT-D Routofy raises funding from Snapdeal co-founders

Delhi-based Routofy Services Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates travel planning portal Routofy.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Indian e-commerce major Snapdeal's co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, a senior executive of the company told Techcircle.in. Nikunj Jain, founder of Frankly.me, also participated in the round.

The funds will be used for expanding team and enhancing technology.

Launched by Raunak Gupta last year, the startup offers a multi-modal route planner in order to plan the journey of a user when he/she has exhausted all direct commutation options. It aggregates all possible linkages including cars, buses, trains and flights to facilitate the journey on the scheduled date. An IITian (2010-15 batch), Gupta came up with the idea for the startup while he was staying in Europe on a student exchange programme back in 2012. He used to travel to different places during the weekends and would find it very difficult to aggregate the right set of commutation each time.

"It returns the best hundred paths in a fraction of second, after analysing millions of possible paths/itineraries, all in real-time and on current prices and schedules," said Gupta.

As of now, the site earns money on an affiliate basis. "The next step will be to make these point-to-point itineraries bookable. Right now we redirect to other sites, in one step; so the transaction happens only once which is actually much more useful in case of mobile," he added.

The startup is also working on a mobile app for the Android platform, which should be out in a month. Techcircle.in had mentioned Routofy as one of the promising startups in its report last year.

Of late, Bahl and Bansal have been aggressively investing in startups. The duo had last invested in Mumbai-based online apparel player Bewakoof.com. Prior to that, they had invested in Gigstart and TinyOwl, among others.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)