After poaching Airtel exec, Shuttl ropes in Snapdeal tech director

Gurgaon-based bus aggregation platform Shuttl, owned by Super Highway Labs Pvt Ltd, has appointed former Snapdeal executive Amit Kumar Gupta as head of engineering.

"Gupta will work towards building a world class technology team that looks to solve large problems, build great scalable systems and develop products that make the consumer commute experience as smooth as possible," Shutttl said in a statement.

Gupta most recently served as director in the technology team at Snapdeal. He was responsible for building the buyer platform (catalog, user profiles and security), seller platform (content management) and data analytics platform (personalisation and recommendation, buyer personas, one customer view).

According to the company, Gupta brings in rich technical insight and aims to build a world class, full stack technology solution at Shuttl.

"Gupta's rich experience in making a personalised technology product will help Shuttl create an interactive transportation platform. His experience in past roles will be valuable for us as we improve the product," said Amit Singh, co-founder, Shuttl.

Last month, the company roped in former Bharti Airtel executive Venkatesh Rangachari as its head of growth.

Founded in April 2015, Shuttl is averaging around 15,000 rides per day across Delhi NCR. Within six months of launch, Shuttl has completed over seven million rides. The startup aims to continue adding routes to its platform and attract top talent across disciplines to solve public transportation problems across Indian cities. Shuttl said it will be doing close to 100,000 rides a day within the next few months.

Shuttl recently raised $20 million from Sequoia Capital, Times Internet Ltd and an international fund. In August, the bus pooling startup had raised $3 million from Sequoia and angel investors, according to data from VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

A host of tech startups have started aggregating buses or mini-buses in recent months. Startups in this space include ZipGo which raised undisclosed venture capital funding early this month. Again, Mumbai-based Cityflo received $750,000 (Rs 4.9 crore) in seed funding from IDG Ventures and an unnamed investor recently. In August, rBus, which provides AC bus services, raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from India Quotient, People Group founder Anupam Mittal and other investors. However, an early exception in this sector is Trevo, a bus aggregation startup based in the national capital region that shut shop after operating for barely a month. The latest entrant in this segment is Mojo, which is operational on Dwarka-Gurgaon and Ghaziabad-Gurgaon routes in the national capital region.