Exclusive: Bus pooling startup Trevo shuts operations

Trevo, a bus aggregation startup based in the national capital region, has shut shop after operating for barely a month.

Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain, two of Trevo's co-founders, said the company has stopped operations but refused to disclose more information.

"We have halted our operations. We are not running the app now," Vij said.

Trevo was launched in early October by IIT and IIM alumni Mayank Jain, Raghav Jain and Vij. The trio had last year launched TalentPad.com, a technology recruitment marketplace that shut shop in August. Mayank and Raghav had previously formed a social referral startup called Zobtree that was also shut down.

Raghav Jain and Vij refused to say whether they plan to re-launch Trevo. "While we are not operational on the Trevo app now, we haven't completely shut down," said Jain. "We are… figuring out what's next. We will have some clarity on our next move in a couple of weeks' time."

The duo also declined to disclose the reasons behind the startup's closure. However, a person familiar with the development said the company was struggling due to lack of funds. "With a high cash burn rate, they couldn't survive for more than a month and eventually shut down operations around Diwali," the person said.

Trevo's closure comes at a time when investors are becoming wary of putting high valuations on firms without clear visibility of revenue or operational growth. As funding becomes scarce, several Indian startups have tweaked business strategies, shut shop or laid off employees. The cumulative number of reported cases of job cuts is around 2,000 while many go unreported across numerous small startups with less than 100 employees.

Trevo aggregated tourist and chartered buses in Delhi-NCR. At the launch, Trevo claimed to have offered rides to about 2,000 passengers every day at Rs 5 per kilometre. The company had plans to cover 25,000 passengers across 100 routes in Delhi-NCR by the end of this year and was reportedly scouting for Series A funding of up to $10 million.

Trevo launched operations in Gurgaon with a team of 15, according to one of its employee's LinkedIn profile.

According to Mayank Jain, all employees of TalentPad had been absorbed into Trevo.

When asked about the fate of Trevo employees, both Raghav Jain and Vij refused to comment.

TalentPad, formerly known as Talent Auction, was a curated marketplace for technology recruitment based out of Bangalore. The company, while closing its operations in August, attributed the move to its inability to figure out a scalable business model.

"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," it said in a blog post at the time of shutting down.

Before launching their ventures, Mayank was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Smile Group. Raghav was an equity research analyst at JP Morgan while Vij was a quantitative analyst at Morgan Stanley.

TalentPad had raised an undisclosed sum in its first round of institutional funding from Helion Venture Partners in October last year. In May this year, TalentPad had acquired OptimizedBits, a tech recruitment platform, for an undisclosed amount.