TalentPad co-founders venture into bus pooling

The co-founders of TalentPad.com, a technology recruitment marketplace that shut shop in August, have started a bus pooling app for intra-city travel.

Christened Trevo, the app will aggregate tourist and chartered buses starting in Gurgaon and Delhi NCR, said Mayank Jain, CEO of Trevo.

All employees of the Helion Venture Partners-backed TalentPad have been absorbed into Trevo, Jain told Techcircle.in.

"We think that buses and mini buses are the future of road transport. There is a need to optimise road space. We also think that over time vehicle ownership will reduce. We are trying to build a mini bus service which is comfortable and reliable," he added.

TalentPad was founded by IIT/IIM alumni Mayank, Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain last year. Mayank and Raghav had previously formed the now defunct startup Zobtree. Before that, Mayank was an entrepreneur in residence at Smile Group. Raghav was an equity research analyst at JP while Vij was a quantitative analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Bus pooling is a relatively new concept in India. Trevo is currently offering rides to about 2,000 passengers every day. The company plans to cover 25,000 passenger across 100 routes in Delhi-NCR by end of this year. The service is priced at Rs 5 per kilometre. The startup is now scouting for Series A funding of upto $10 million.

Last month, Ola launched its shuttle bus services in Bangalore and Gurgaon with about 500 shuttles.

TalentPad closed operations in August as it was unable to figure out a scalable business model.

"With a very heavy heart, we wish to inform you that we at TalentPad are shutting our operations effective immediately. One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that," the blog post read," as per a blog post on the TalentPad website.

Talentpad required candidates to submit a detailed profile for approval. Once the TalentPad team evaluated the candidature, handpicked candidates were asked to participate in a week-long auction process called Talent Fair, where employers compete to hand interview offers online. Post that, the candidate could decides where to be interviewed and the interview process would start. In May, TalentPad had acquired OptimizedBits, a tech recruitment platform, for an undisclosed amount.